Three of Saturn's brood hurtle around the vast icy disk of its rings.
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) hangs at the top of this view,
with its large crater Herschel in view; Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52
miles across) lies outside the narrow F ring at right; and centered
between the F and A rings at bottom is little Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20
miles across).
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 5 degrees
below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 19, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Mimas, on
which the image scale is 19 kilometers (12 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 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.
