CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Eclipsing a Moon

Eclipsing a Moon
PIA 14617
Avg Rating: 9.61/10

Full Size 840x842:
JPEG 20 KB
PNG 25 KB
TIFF 50 KB
   Saturn's moon Enceladus is partially eclipsed by the planet in this Cassini view which also features the moon Titan in the distance.

Cassini flew by Enceladus, shown in the center of the view, at a distance of about 16,000 miles (26,000 kilometers). The terminator between the day and night sides of Enceladus (313 miles, 504 kilometers across) can be seen on the left, and the shadow of the planet runs across the bottom.

Titan (3200 miles, 5150 kilometers across) is in the bottom right of this image and is about 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from the spacecraft. See PIA11508 to see Titan eclipsed by the planet.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing sides of Enceladus and Titan. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 1, 2011. The view was obtained at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Scale in the original image was 2 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel on Enceladus. The image was contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of 1.5 to enhance the visibility of surface features.

The Cassini Solstice 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 Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Released: July 16, 2012 (PIA 14617)
Image/Caption Information