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Moons in the Night
PIA 08919
Avg Rating: 9.10/10
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Sunlight makes visible the faint band called the E ring as two moons meet on the sky.
Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) and Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across) appear close together in the sky in this image, but in reality, Tethys was more than 260,000 kilometers (162,000 miles) farther from Cassini. Enceladus is easy to identify by the brilliant plume of ice erupting from its south pole.
Although this perspective views the night sides of both moons, the Sun is not the only source of illumination in the Saturn system. Tethys is at a fuller phase with respect to Saturn, and thus its "night side" is more fully lit than that of Enceladus.
The view was acquired from a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 163 degrees, a viewing geometry in which the microscopic ice particles in its plume brighten substantially.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 6, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Enceladus and 4.2 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Tethys. Image scale is 23 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Enceladus and 25 kilometers (16 miles) on Tethys.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: April 16, 2007 (PIA 08919)
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