Click on the image for movie
As the moon Enceladus eclipses its neighbor Mimas, Cassini records a scene
possible only around the time of Saturn's approaching equinox.
Seven images, each taken about 30 seconds apart, were combined to create
this movie which shows the shadow of Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313
miles, across) darkening Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles, across).
Although Saturn has eclipsed moons in previous images (see PIA11143 and
PIA11508), this is the first time Cassini has imaged one of Saturn's moons
being eclipsed by another moon rather than the planet. The novel
illumination geometry created as the Saturnian system approaches equinox
means that during this time moons orbiting in or near the plane of
Saturn's equatorial rings can cast shadows onto the rings and onto each
other.
To learn more about this special time and to see a movie of a moon's
shadow moving across the rings, see PIA11651.
The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 13, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Mimas and at
a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 43 degrees. Image scale is 8
kilometers (5 miles) 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.