English: PIA17194: Spongy Surface of Hyperion

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17194

NASA's Cassini imaging scientists processed this view of Saturn's moon Hyperion, taken during a close flyby on May 31, 2015. This flyby marks the mission's final close approach to Saturn's largest irregularly shaped moon.

North on Hyperion is up and rotated 34 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 31, 2015.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 24,000 miles (38,000 kilometers) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46 degrees. Image scale is 145 feet (230 meters) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

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