The moons Dione and Tethys face each other across the gulf of Saturn's
rings. Here, the Cassini spacecraft looks on the Saturn-facing hemisphere
of Tethys below and the anti-Saturn side of Dione above. The dark groove
in the rings is the Cassini Division.
Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across, while Dione is 1,126
kilometers (700 miles) across.
This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 22, 2005, at a distance of approximately
860,000 kilometers (530,000 miles) from Dione. Tethys was on the far side
of the rings, 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Cassini. The
image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel on Dione and 9 kilometers
(6 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.