This view from Cassini contains not one, but two moons. Tethys is slightly
overexposed so that the real target of this image, tiny Atlas, can be
seen. Atlas is at image center, just outside the A ring.
A couple of faint ringlets are visible in the Encke Gap, right of center.
Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) wide; Atlas is a mere 32 kilometers
(20 miles) wide.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 21, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2
million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Tethys and 1.7 million
kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Atlas. The image scale is 12
kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Tethys.
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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.