Four of Saturn's many and varied moons crowd this single frame from
Cassini.
All of the moons are illuminated by the sun, which is out of the frame to
the right. "Saturnshine," or reflected light from the planet (out of frame
to the lower left), partly illuminates three of the moons: Tethys (1,071
kilometers, or 665 miles across, at upper right), Janus (181 kilometers,
or 113 miles across, at lower left) and Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72
miles across, below and left of center). Enceladus (505 kilometers, or
314 miles across) shows merely a slim crescent below center.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 17, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.7
million kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 27
kilometers (17 miles) per pixel on Tethys, 21 kilometers (13 miles) per
pixel on Enceladus, and 22 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Janus and
Epimetheus.
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.