Two ring moons chase each other as their larger sibling looks on. This
view shows Tethys at lower left, along with perpetually mingling
Epimetheus at left of center, and Janus at center.
Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across; Epimetheus is 116
kilometers (72 miles) across; and Janus is 181 kilometers (113 miles)
across.
In the background, the faint G ring and brilliant F ring bound the
location where Cassini entered Saturn orbit. The spacecraft passed between
these two rings upon arrival in mid-2004.
Near the right side of the image, a couple of ringlets within the Encke
gap glow faintly.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 15, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9
million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Janus, 4 million kilometers
(2.5 million miles) from Epimetheus, and 3.7 million kilometers (2.3
million miles) from Tethys. Image scale is 24 kilometers (15 miles) per
pixel on Janus and Epimetheus and 22 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on
Tethys.
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.
