Tethys Behind Titan
What's that behind Titan? It's another of Saturn's moons: Tethys. The robotic Cassini
spacecraft orbiting Saturn captured the heavily cratered Tethys slipping behind Saturn's
atmosphere-shrouded Titan late last year. The largest crater on Tethys, Odysseus, is easily
visible on the distant moon. Titan shows not only its thick and opaque orange lower
atmosphere, but also an unusual upper layer of blue-tinted haze. Tethys, at about 2 million
kilometers distant, was twice as far from Cassini as was Titan when the above image was taken.
In 2004, Cassini released the Hyugens probe which landed on Titan and provided humanity's
first views of the surface of the Solar System's only known lake-bearing moon.