CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Encircling Saturn

Encircling Saturn
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   Saturn's sunlit rings gleam in the blackness as two icy moons cruise past in the foreground.

Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) is a small crescent near upper left; Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) is a speck above the F ring, near center. Janus was brightened slightly for visibility.

This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 5 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 7, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 139 degrees. Image scale on the sky at the distance of Saturn is 63 kilometers (39 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 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 InstituteNASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: December 15, 2006 (PIA 08837)
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