Three of Saturn's icy moons are seen here, along with the magnificent
water-ice rings and the cold gaseous envelope of the planet's atmosphere.
Saturn's dark shadow stretches completely across the rings.
At nine and a half times farther from the Sun than Earth, Saturn inhabits
the deep cold of the outer solar system. The Sun appears only 1 percent
as bright there as it appears at Earth, creating an environment where ice
dominates over rock.
The icy Moons visible here, from left to right are: Janus (181 kilometers,
or 113 miles, across), Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles, across),
and Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles, across).
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on June 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.4
million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is
139 kilometers (86 miles) 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
