Moon Quartet

Saturn rings, Epimetheus, Janus, Prometheus and Atlas
September 7, 2010
PIA NumberPIA12715
Language
  • english

A quartet of Saturn's moons are shown with a sliver of the rings in this Cassini spacecraft view.

From left to right in this image are Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across), Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across), Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) and Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across).

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 27, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Janus, Prometheus and Atlas. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Epimetheus. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on Janus, Prometheus and Atlas. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Epimetheus.

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