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Map of Iapetus - May 2008

Oct. 17, 2008
This global map of Saturn's moon Iapetus was created using images taken during NASA's Cassini spacecraft flybys, with Voyager images filling in the gaps in Cassini's coverage.

This global map of Saturn's moon Iapetus was created using images taken during Cassini spacecraft flybys, with Voyager images filling in the gaps in Cassini's coverage.

Iapetus is the moon of Saturn which, curiously, has one bright hemisphere and one dark.

The map is an equidistant (simple cylindrical) projection and has a scale of 803 meters (0.5 miles) per pixel at the equator. Some territory seen in this map was imaged by Cassini using reflected light from Saturn. The mean radius of Iapetus used for projection of this map is 736 kilometers (457 miles). The resolution of the map is 16 pixels per degree. This mosaic map is an update to the version released in January 2008 (see PIA08406).

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.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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