June 22, 2006
Ithaca Chasma rips across the cratered surface of Tethys, creating a scar more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) long, from north to south.
Cassini got a closer look at this ancient rift during a Sept. 2005 flyby of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). See Steep Scarps for a high-resolution view of the chasm.
This view shows the Saturn-facing side of Tethys. North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 21, 2006 at a distance of approximately 715,000 kilometers (444,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 48 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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 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.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute