Cassini has Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across, at bottom) and
Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across, at center left) on its side as
it gazes across the ringplane at distant Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665
miles across, at top). The two smaller moons were on the side of the rings
closer to Cassini when this image was taken. Little structure is visible
on the moons, aside from a stippling of craters.
Two dark notches in the rings at right are the Encke and Keeler gaps. The
thin, bright arc of the F ring extends toward far right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on November 17, 2005, at a distance of approximately
3.1 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is
20 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel on Tethys and 18 kilometers (11 miles)
per pixel Mimas.
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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
