Tethys in color
Tethys in color An enhanced-color global view of Tethys from Cassini's 14 April 2012 flyby. NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI / color composite by Emily Lakdawalla

After performing a stunt dive past Enceladus on April 14, 2012, Cassini enjoyed another relatively close encounter, with Tethys. This global view demonstrates how strangely flat the crater Penelope is (near the terminator); the pointy nose of the central peak of crater Melanthius is near the bottom. The northern end of Ithaca Chasma -- the set of old, eroded fissures that winds across a huge portion of Tethys' surface -- creeps over the top of the globe.

This is an enhanced-color image composed of three raw images from the Cassini website (infrared, green, and ultraviolet filters). The images were de-interlaced (to remove every-other-line truncation), aligned with each other, and level-adjusted before merging into this color composite.