PIA 10570
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Ithaca Chasma, an enormous rift that stretches more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from north to south across the face of Tethys, seemingly takes a bite out of the moon's limb in this image from Cassini.
The canyon runs from the shadow of night in the north, across the crater Telemachus, and on to the southern limb of the moon. (North on Tethys is up and 16 degrees to the right in this image.) Impact craters obliterate the canyon's older tectonic features and attest to the rift's great age.
A dramatic close-up of the rift can be seen from a 2005 flyby of the moon (seePIA07734).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 9, 2008 at a distance of approximately 245,000 kilometers (152,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 84 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (4,804 feet) 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: February 3, 2009 (PIA 10570)
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