Saturn sits with its attendants in the icy depths of the outer Solar
System.
Near the edge-on rings, moons visible from left to right: Dione (1,126
kilometers, or 700 miles across), Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles
across) and Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across). The ring shadow
forms a headband crowning Saturn's northern hemisphere.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 752 nanometers with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Aug. 8, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Saturn.
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.
