The Cassini spacecraft captures three moons at once as they hurtle around
Saturn. In the background, Saturn's night side covers the more distant
portion of the rings, betraying the presence of the unseen giant.
At left and right respectively, the two smaller moons are Epimetheus (116
kilometers, or 72 miles across) and Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles
across). Larger Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) lies below.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 16, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.3
million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is
about 20 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.
