Thursday, July 15, 2010

Tethys' Melanthius Crater


The Cassini spacecraft looks toward an area between the trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of Tethys and spies the large crater Melanthius near the moon's south pole.

Melanthius, at the bottom of this image, is about 250 kilometers (155 miles) wide on Tethys. See PIA10412 for another view. North on Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) is up and rotated 19 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 29, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 670,000 kilometers (416,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 41 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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