As our robotic emissary to Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft is privileged to
behold such fantastic sights as this pairing of two moons beyond the
rings. The bright, narrow F ring is the outermost ring structure seen
here.
In this scene, bright Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across)
begins to slip in front of more distant Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700
miles across). Enceladus is closer to Saturn than Dione, and orbits the
planet at greater velocity. Thus, the smaller moon eventually passed the
larger one, as seen from the Cassini spacecraft, and continued on its way.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 3, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet
light centered at 338 nanometers and at a distance of approximately 2.6
million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Enceladus and 2.7 million
kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Dione. The view was taken from a phase
angle (Sun-moon-spacecraft angle) of 139 degrees; about the same angle
with respect to both moons. Image scale is about 16 kilometers (10 miles)
per pixel on Enceladus and Dione.
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.