- Original Caption Released with Image:
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Saturn's icy satellites wheel about the colorful giant planet, while the
rings shine dimly in scattered sunlight. The Ringed Planet is, in many
ways, a laboratory for investigating the history of our solar system and
how planets form around other stars.
There are four moons visible in this view. Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or
665 miles across), largest in the scene, is on the far side of the
ringplane. Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across), is the one on the
near side of the rings, below Tethys. Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles
across), is left of the rings' edge. Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles
across) is a speck below the rings' edge, between Janus and Mimas.
Mimas casts a shadow onto Saturn's bluish northern hemisphere.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2
degrees above the ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The view was acquired with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 30, 2007. The view was taken at a
distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from
Saturn. Image scale is 153 kilometers (95 miles) per pixel on the planet.
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.
- Image Credit:
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NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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