In a silent orbital ballet, Saturn's crater-covered moon Rhea slips
between the moons Mimas and Enceladus. The dark sides of Enceladus
(bottom) and Mimas (top) are dimly illuminated by reflected light from
Saturn.
Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across, Mimas is 397 kilometers (247
miles) across, and Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
The movie was created using 59 clear-filter images taken over a period of
about 40 minutes. The images were acquired by the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 27, 2006, at a mean distance of approximately
3 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Rhea, 3.5 million kilometers
(2.2 million miles) from Mimas, and 3.7 million kilometers (2.3 million
miles) from Enceladus. The image scale is approximately 18 kilometers (11
miles) per pixel on Rhea, 21 kilometers (13 miles) per pixel on Mimas, and
22 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Enceladus.
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.
