The Cassini spacecraft snapped this Saturn portrait from the distance of
Iapetus, just before beginning its close encounter with the two-toned moon.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is visible against the
clouds of the northern hemisphere. Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles
across) stands out as a bright speck against the dark ring shadows, near
center.
Enceladus is not pictured here, although it casts its shadow upon the
northern hemisphere, to the left of Rhea.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 4 degrees
below the ringplane. The rings disappear into the planet's shadow at
right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 3.3 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 195 kilometers (121 miles) per pixel on the planet.
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.
