While on final approach for its Sept. 2007 close encounter with Saturn's
moon Iapetus, Cassini spun around to take in a sweeping view of the Saturn
System.
Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across) is the only major moon of
Saturn with a significant inclination to its orbit. From the other major
satellites, the rings would appear nearly edge-on, but from Iapetus, the
rings usually appear at a tilt, as seen here.
This natural color mosaic consists of 15 red, green and blue spectral
filter images acquired in five wide-angle camera footprints that swept
across the scene.
Moons visible in this image: Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across)
at center left, Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) near the
left side ansa (or ring edge), Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across)
a speck against the ring shadows on Saturn's western limb, Rhea (1,528
kilometers, or 949 miles across) against the bluish backdrop of the
northern hemisphere, Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) near
the right ansa, and Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) near
lower right.
The images were obtained on Sept. 10, 2007, at a distance of approximately
3.3 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn at a
sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees. Image scale is about
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.
