Epimetheus floats in the distance below center, showing only the barest
hint of its irregular shape. Pandora hides herself in the ringplane, near
upper right, appearing as little more than a bump.
This view is from just above the ringplane and shows features on the
unlit side of Saturn's rings.
Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across) and Pandora (84
kilometers, or 52 miles across) hug the outer reaches of Saturn's main
rings. Pandora orbits just outside the F ring, and Epimetheus jockeys for
position with Janus, 10,000 kilometers beyond. Janus and Epimetheus
recently swapped positions, and Janus will remain the innermost of the
pair until 2010, when they will swap positions again.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 29, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.3
million kilometers (2 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is
approximately 20 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel at the distance of
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
