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Saturn, rings, and two small moons
November 8, 2007
PIA NumberPIA09767
Language
  • english

The Cassini spacecraft returns another dazzling postcard from its journey with this view of cloud-streaked Saturn and two of its moons.

Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) appears against the planet. Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is seen below the rings at left.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 6 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 25, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 67 degrees. Image scale is 130 kilometers (81 miles) per pixel.

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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute