Ta'ãnga:Tethys cassini.jpg

Tethys, a moon of Saturn, imaged by the Cassini-Huygens Mission. The canyons of Ithaca Chasma can just be made out at the top left of the image.

	Este archivo es de dominio público porque fue creado por la NASA. Las políticas sobre copyright de la NASA estipulan que «el material de la NASA no está protegido con copyright a menos que se indique lo contrario». (Políticas sobre copyright de la NASA o Políticas sobre la utilización de imágenes del Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
	Advertencias: El uso del logotipo de la NASA (incluidos el logotipo actual y los anteriores) está restringido. El sitio web de la NASA almacena una gran cantidad de imágenes del Programa Espacial de la URSS, de la Agencia Espacial Federal Rusa y otras agencias espaciales no estadounidenses. Estas imágenes no son de dominio público. Material del Telescopio espacial Hubble puede tener copyright si no proviene explícitamente del Space Telescope Science Institute. [1] Todo el material creado por la sonda espacial SOHO está protegido por copyright y requiere permiso para ser utilizado con fines comerciales o no educativos. [2] Las imágenes que figuran en el sitio web Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) pueden tener copyright. [3]

Link to the external image:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06140

Original caption released with the image:

Having passed closer to Tethys than the Voyager 2 spacecraft, Cassini has returned the best-ever natural color view of this icy Saturnian moon.

As seen here, the battered surface of Tethys (1,060 kilometers, or 659 miles across) has a neutral hue. The image here is a mosaic of two footprints. Three images taken in the red, green and blue filters were taken to form a natural color composite. The result reveals a world nearly saturated with craters - many small craters lie on top of older, larger ones, suggesting an ancient surface. At the top and along the boundary between day and night, the moon's terrain has a grooved appearance.

This moon is known to have a density very close to that of water, indicating it is likely composed mainly of water ice. Its frozen mysteries await Cassini's planned close flyby in September 2005.

The view shows primarily the trailing hemisphere of Tethys, which is the side opposite the moon's direction of motion in its orbit. The image has been rotated so that north on Tethys is up.

The images comprising this color view were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Oct. 28, 2004, at a distance of about 256,000 kilometers (159,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. The image scale is 1.5 kilometers (0.9 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 Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute