CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Ring Tableau

Ring Tableau
PIA 09768
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   Cassini observes a gathering of three moons near the rings of Saturn.

Largest in the scene, Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across) sits on the side of the rings nearer to Cassini. Oblong Epimetheus (113 kilometers, 70 miles across) lies on the distant side of the narrow F ring. Less obvious is tiny Daphnis (8 kilometers, 5 miles across), which is made easier to spot by the waves it creates in the edges of the narrow Keeler Gap. Daphnis appears directly below the eastern limb of Mimas.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 3, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Mimas. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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: November 9, 2007 (PIA 09768)
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