Categories: Saturn

Rings and Moons

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
The multitude of grooves for which Saturn’s rings are famed, clumps in the F ring, and several Saturnian moons are visible in this image. Moons visible in the image are: Mimas (398 kilometers, 247 miles across) above the rings at left; Epimetheus (116 kilometers, 72 miles across) just above the A ring ansa; Enceladus (499 kilometers, 310 miles across) near upper right. The image was taken with the narrow angle camera on May 10, 2004 at a distance of 27.1million kilometers (16.8 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 162 kilometers (101 miles) per pixel. Contrast in the image was enhanced to aid visibility.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Fraser Cain

Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today. He's also the co-host of Astronomy Cast with Dr. Pamela Gay. Here's a link to my Mastodon account.

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