Three Moons in a Row

Dione, Prometheus and Epimetheus all aligned in a row. Click to enlarge
This fortunate view sights along Saturn’s ringplane to capture three moons aligned in a row: Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) at left, Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) at center and Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across) at right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 2, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 19 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel on Dione, and about 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Prometheus 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release