CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Shadow Spot

Shadow Spot
PIA 09792
Avg Rating: 7.36/10

Full Size 1020x1020:
JPEG 184 KB
PNG 550 KB
TIFF 1.0 MB
   Cassini gazes into the blustery, ever changing atmosphere of Saturn as the tiny shadow of Epimetheus drifts across the cloud tops.

The view looks toward a region in Saturn's atmosphere 24 degrees north of the planet's equator. Epimetheus is 113 kilometers (70 miles) across and orbits about 151,400 kilometers (94,100 miles) from the planet.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 7, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 17 kilometers (11 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: December 13, 2007 (PIA 09792)
Image/Caption Information