Tethys sports an enormous impact basin, Odysseus.
The impact basin is 450-kilometers (280-miles) wide and contains a central complex of mountains. See PIA07693 for a close-up view of Odysseus.
Lit terrain seen here is on leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across). North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 31, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 717,000 kilometers (446,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 59 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini Equinox Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: July 8, 2008 (PIA 10420)
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PIA 10420
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I thought that the Ithaca Chasm was formed when the crust froze as hard as rock quickly, but the interior froze more slowly, expanding slightly as it did so, causing the crust above to crack open, forming this enormous canyon, just like a huge graben.
In that case, Ithaca Chasm & the Odysseus Crater are not related. Or am I wrong now, with new information made available by Cassini?
I have studied many images of Ithaca Chasm, looking for evidence of cryovolcanism, but have found none. To me Ithaca Chasm just looks like a gigantic, ancient, beaten up, cratered graben.
Andrew Brown.
Bruno: I look at the cloud structures in the Saturn atmosphere and think of strands of DNA. To each his/her own. About Odysseus and Ithaca Chasm, yes there have been suggestions that the two are related.
It is surely a question that has been asked a thousand times, sorry for that.
The Herschel impact crater on Mimas is always presented with much awe as the result of an event that nearly shattered this moon.
But Odysseus is even larger compared to he size of Tehtys. Is Ithaca chasma the scar of this terrible impact, or is it unrelated? If it is unrelated, then are there signs of the stressful event elsewhere?
