CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Satellite Companionship

Satellite Companionship
PIA 12544
Avg Rating: 9.33/10

Full Size 1016x990:
JPEG 60 KB
PNG 145 KB
TIFF 1.0 MB
   Saturn shares its space with its moon Tethys in this Cassini-captured scene.

Tethys (1062 kilometers, 660 miles across) can be seen above the rings near the middle of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 99 degrees. Image scale is 135 kilometers (84 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. 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 Equinox Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: February 8, 2010 (PIA 12544)
Image/Caption Information