The Cassini spacecraft reveals details on the surface of small,
irregularly shaped Helene in this close-up view, obtained during the
spacecraft's closest encounter with this moon during its four-year primary
mission.
Helene (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across) is a Trojan moon, sharing
Dione's orbit but staying 60 degrees or 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles)
ahead of the much larger moon.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 20, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 39,000 kilometers (24,000 miles) from Helene and at a
Sun-Helene-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 61 degrees. Image scale is 231
meters (758 feet) 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 mission for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard
cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations
center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
