Like a half-full Moon, cratered Tethys (1060 kilometers, 659 miles across) hangs before Cassini in this narrow angle camera view taken on July 3, 2004.
Voyager images showed a large fracture on Tethys about 750 kilometers (470 miles) long (not seen in this view.) Cassini will investigate this and other features on Tethys during two planned flybys, the first occurring on September 24, 2005.
The image was taken in visible light from a distance of 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 97 degrees. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Original Source: CICLOPS News Release