Tethys may not be tiny by normal standards, but when it is captured alongside Saturn, it can't help but seem pretty small.
Even Saturn's rings appear to dwarf Tethys (660 miles, or 1,062
kilometers across), which is in the upper left of the image, although
scientists believe the moon to be many times more massive than the
entire ring system combined. This view looks toward the unilluminated
side of the rings from about 18 degrees below the ringplane. The image
was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera
on Aug. 19, 2012.
The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) from Saturn and
at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale
is 86 miles (138 kilometers) 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.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
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