The exquisitely formed shadow of the moon Mimas graces Saturn's A ring in
this Cassini portrait.
Saturn's moons cast shadows onto the rings as the planet approaches its
August 2009 equinox. To learn more about this special time and to see a
movie of a moon's shadow moving across the rings, see PIA11651.
Mimas is not shown in this image, but Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53
miles across) is visible in the bottom of the image between the A ring and
the thin F ring. Other bright specks in the image are background stars.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 60
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 30, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 69
degrees. Image scale is 69 kilometers (43 miles) per pixel.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 1
degree above the ringplane. The rings and Pandora have been brightened
relative to the other moons to enhance visibility. The image was taken in
green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 11,
2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million
kilometers (870,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale on Tethys is about 82 kilometers
pixels per pixel.
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.