Cold Sunshine

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, Posted on: Saturday, 2 August 2008, 01:11 CDT Download full size image

Weak sunlight illuminates Saturn's large, icy moon Tethys and its giant crater Odysseus.

At the orbit of Saturn the Sun's light is between 80 and 100 times fainter than at Earth, depending on where the planet is in its eccentric (out of round) orbit, making high noon on Tethys like twilight on Earth.

This view looks toward the northern hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) on the moon's anti-Saturn side. North is up and rotated 10 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 21, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 770,000 kilometers (479,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

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