Saturn's brilliant rings are accompanied here by a pack of small moons.
Visible in this view, from lower left to center right are Mimas (397
kilometers, or 247 miles across), Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles
across), Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) and Prometheus (102
kilometers, or 63 miles across). The narrow F ring lies between the latter
two, which are its "shepherd moons."
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 14
degrees above the ringplane. The planet's night side is visible through
the rings at left. Saturn's shadow stretches across the ringplane above
center.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on April 29, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.9
million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 108
kilometers (67 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.
