Obscuring Epimetheus

Saturn's rings and the moon Epimetheus
July 24, 2008
PIA NumberPIA10432
Language
  • english

Saturn's narrow F ring partly obscures the small moon Epimetheus. Interior to the F ring is the bright A ring.

Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across at its widest point) is on the side of the rings opposite from Cassini.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 2 degrees below the ringplane.The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (766,000 miles) from Epimetheus. Image scale is 7 kilometers (5 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