Odysseus is the name of the huge crater on Saturn’s moon Tethys. Tethys is a bit more than 1000 km in diameter, and the crater is roughy 450 km across. To put that into scale, a crater that covered the same percentage of the Earth’s surface would be about the size of Africa.
Image Credit: NASA
Saturn’s moon Tethys seems to float in front of Saturn’s rings in this picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft. The rings appear almost edge-on as dark bands above Tethys, and their curving shadows fall on the planet at the bottom of the image.
Image Credit: NASA
In this picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft the two large craters on Tethys near the line where day fades to night seem to be looking at Saturn. (Click the image to embiggen it.)
The shadowing on the craters caused by being near Tethys’ terminator throws their topography into sharp relief. The larger, southernmost of the two shows a more complex structure. Its central peak is probably the result of the surface reacting to the violent post-impact excavation of the crater. The northern crater doesn’t have a similar feature. The impact was likely too small to form a central peak, or the composition of the material in the immediate vicinity couldn’t support the formation of a central peak.
Image Credit: NASA
Saturn’s moon Tethys’s trailing side shows two terrains that tell a story of a rough past. To the north (up in this picture) is older, rougher terrain, while to the south is new material dubbed “smooth plains” by scientists. The smooth plains are roughly antipodal to the large impact crater Odysseus. Odysseus, which is on the far side of Tethys, is out of view. The leading theory is that the impact that created Odysseus also created the smooth plains, although exactly how this happened is not yet clear.
Image Credit: NASA
At 116,500 km across, Saturn is roughly 10 times the diameter of Earth. The planet is much larger in relation to its moons than our Earth to its Moon. Saturn’s moon Tethys (which is a bit more than 1,000 km in diameter and could be counted as a dwarf planet it orbited the Sun by itself) can be seen as a speck in the lower right of the picture.
Image Credit: NASA
Enceladus and Tethys line up almost perfectly in this shot from the Cassini spacecraft. Since the two moons are not only aligned, but also at nearly the same distance from Cassini, their apparent sizes are a reasonable approximation of their relative sizes. Enceladus is 504 km across, and Tethys is 1,062 km in diameter.
Image Credit: NASA
Saturn’s moon Tethys with its prominent Odysseus Crater seems to lurk behind Saturn’s largest moon Titan in this image taken by the Cassini spacecraft in 2014.
The Titans were the pre-Olympian gods in Greek mythology. Tethys was a Titan daughter of Uranus and Gaia, sister and wife of the Titan Oceanus, and mother of the river gods and the Oceanids
Image Credit: NASA
Dione was the daughter of Tethys in Greek mythology. In the real world, Saturn’s moons Tethys and Dione are not mother and daughter. They are more like sisters since they’re believed to have formed out of the same disk around Saturn.
Dione is the upper moon in the picture; Tethys is the lower.
Image Credit: NASA
Dione was the daughter of Tethys in Greek mythology. In the real world, Saturn’s moons Tethys and Dione are not mother and daughter. They are more like sisters since they’re believed to have formed out of the same disk around Saturn.
Dione is the upper moon in the picture; Tethys is the lower.
Image Credit: NASA
The animation shows the orbits of Saturn’s visible moons Tethys, Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, and Rhea over the observing run in June, 2019 (with elapsed time bar).
Video Credits: NASA / ESA / A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center) / M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) / J. DePasquale (STScI)
Don’t worry. It’s a moon, not a space station.
It’s Saturn’s icy moon Tethys. The enormous impact created the crater is named Odysseus. The crater is about 450 km across surrounded by a ring of steep cliffs and and has a rang of mountains rising from its center. Tethys is only a bit over 1070 km in diameter.
This picture is a composite assembled from images taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft in 2015 when is was roughly 44,500 km from the moon.
Image Credit: NASA
Cassini snapped this picture with its narrow-angle camera. It shows Saturn and its rings seen here nearly edge on. The image also shows the moons Mimas (above the rings), tiny Janus (apparently almost in the rings), and Tethys (below the rings). “Above” and “below” the rings is a matter of perspective. All three moons and the rings orbit Saturn in roughly the same plane.
Image Credit: NASA
The Cassini spacecraft took this picture through a violet light filter in 2005. It shows the moons Tethys and Mimas on either side of the planet’s rings and the shadows of the rings falling on the clouds below.
Image Credit: NASA
Saturn’s moon Tethys seems to float in front of Saturn’s rings in this picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft. The rings appear almost edge-on as dark bands above Tethys, and their curving shadows fall on the planet at the bottom of the image.
Image Credit: NASA
At 116,500 km across, Saturn is roughly 10 times the diameter of Earth. The planet is much larger in relation to its moons than our Earth to its Moon. Saturn’s moon Tethys (which is a bit more than 1,000 km in diameter and could be counted as a dwarf planet it orbited the Sun by itself) can be seen as a speck in the lower right of the picture.
Image Credit: NASA
Enceladus and Tethys line up almost perfectly in this shot from the Cassini spacecraft. Since the two moons are not only aligned, but also at nearly the same distance from Cassini, their apparent sizes are a reasonable approximation of their relative sizes. Enceladus is 504 km across, and Tethys is 1,062 km in diameter.
Image Credit: NASA
Dione was the daughter of Tethys in Greek mythology. In the real world, Saturn’s moons Tethys and Dione are not mother and daughter. They are more like sisters since they’re believed to have formed out of the same disk around Saturn.
Dione is the upper moon in the picture; Tethys is the lower.
Image Credit: NASA
In this picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft last April, the two large craters on Tethys near the line where day fades to night seem to be looking at Saturn. (Click the image to embiggen it.)
The shadowing on the craters caused by being near Tethys’ terminator throws their topography into sharp relief. The larger, southernmost of the two shows a more complex structure. Its central peak is probably the result of the surface reacting to the violent post-impact excavation of the crater. The northern crater doesn’t have a similar feature. The impact was likely too small to form a central peak, or the composition of the material in the immediate vicinity couldn’t support the formation of a central peak.
Image Credit: NASA
Odysseus is the name of the huge crater on Saturn’s moon Tethys. Tethys is a bit more than 1000 km in diameter, and the crater is roughy 450 km across. To put that into scale, a crater that covered the same percentage of the Earth’s surface would be about the size of Africa.
Image Credit: NASA
This view of a couple of Saturn’s moons show Tethys seeming to peek over Rhea’s shoulder.
Image Credit: NASA
Saturn’s moon Tethys with its prominent Odysseus Crater seems to lurk behind Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
Image Credit: NASA
The Cassini spacecraft has sent us this family photo of three of Saturn’s moons that are different from each other. The largest of the three, Tethys is round and has a variety of terrains across its surface. Hyperion (to the upper-left of Tethys) is the “wild one” with a chaotic spin, and Prometheus (lower-left) is a tiny moon that busies itself shepherding the F ring.
Image Credit: NASA
Shadows cast by Saturn’s rings darken the planet’s southern hemisphere and cause the truncated appearance to the bottom of this image taken by the Cassini spacecraft. Saturn’s moon Tethys is is in the foreground on the right. The smaller moon Epimetheus can be seen below the center of the image.
Image Credit: NASA
Saturn’s moon Tethys’s trailing side shows two terrains that tell a story of a rough past. To the north (up in this picture) is older, rougher terrain, while to the south is new material dubbed “smooth plains” by scientists. The smooth plains are roughly antipodal to the large impact crater Odysseus. Odysseus, which is on the far side of Tethys, is out of view. The leading theory is that the impact that created Odysseus also created the smooth plains, although exactly how this happened is not yet clear.
Image Credit: NASA
There’s a giant impact crater on Saturn’s moon Tethys called Oddyseus. The crater, which is 450 km across, is on the leading hemisphere of the moon which is only about 1070 km in diameter. A crater on the Earth of similar scale would stretch from New York City to Denver.
Image Credit: NASA