The Cassini spacecraft captured this glimpse of icy Epimetheus just before
the small moon disappeared behind the bulk of Saturn's atmosphere.
See PIA07567 for a closer view of Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or
72 miles across).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.3
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Epimetheus and 2.2 million
kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 14
kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Epimetheus and 13 kilometers (8 miles)
per pixel on Saturn.
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.