Animation
Tethys Meets Dione
This brief movie catches Saturn's moon Tethys partially occulting the moon
Dione. It shows the trailing hemispheres of both moons (terrain centered
on roughly 270 degrees longitude). Some rotation is evident on Tethys
during the sequence.
Tethys' diameter is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles). Dione's diameter is
1,126 kilometers (700 miles).
The difference in the surface brightness of the two moons is immediately
apparent.
The images in this movie sequence were taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 11, 2005, at a distance
of 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Tethys and 2.6 million
kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Dione. The image scale is about 15
kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on both moons.
A still image of this movie is also available (see PIA07621). It
shows the two moons again, from an opposite viewing angle, with Dione in
the near field.
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.