(Click for full image) Saturn and Tethys Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft views the sunlit side of Saturn.
It is easy to forget just how large Saturn is, at around 10 times the diameter of Earth. And with a diameter of about 72,400 miles (116,500 kilometers), the planet simply dwarfs its retinue of moons. One of those satellites, Tethys (660 miles or 1,062 kilometers across), is seen here at the lower right.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 8 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 7, 2015, using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
Tethys has been brightened by a factor of 2 to increase its visibility.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.6 million kilometers) from Saturn. The image scale is 10 miles (16 kilometers) per pixel. Tethys is slightly closer at 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) away, for an image scale of 9 miles (14 kilometers) per pixel.
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