CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Trio Near the Rings

Trio Near the Rings
PIA 09016
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   Three of Saturn's diverse family of moons are captured in this view.

Smoggy Titan (5,150 kilometers, 3,200 miles across) hovers above the thin line of the rings. Much smaller Epimetheus (113 kilometers, 70 miles across) is a mere speck at far left. Bright Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) sits directly in front of the ringplane from Cassini's vantage point.

Saturn's rings cast dark shadows onto its northern hemisphere.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 23, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (889,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 82 kilometers (51 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 Institute
Released: August 29, 2007 (PIA 09016)
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