The Cassini spacecraft delivers this stunning vista showing small,
battered Epimetheus and smog-enshrouded Titan, with Saturn's A and F
rings stretching across the scene.
The prominent dark region visible in the A ring is the Encke Gap, in
which the moon Pan and several narrow ringlets reside. Moon-driven
features that mark the A ring are easily seen to the left and right of
the Encke Gap. The Encke Gap is 325 kilometers (200 miles) wide. Pan is
26 kilometers (16 miles) across.
In an optical illusion, the narrow F ring, outside the A ring, appears to
fade across the disk of Titan. A couple of bright clumps can be seen in
the F ring.
Epimetheus is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across and giant Titan is 5,150
kilometers (3,200 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 28, 2006, at a distance of approximately
667,000 kilometers (415,000 miles) from Epimetheus and 1.8 million
kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Titan. The image captures the
illuminated side of the rings. The image scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles)
per pixel on Epimetheus and 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Titan.
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.
