At first glance, it seems Epimetheus is the lone moon orbiting Saturn in
this image, but a closer inspection reveals a couple of companions in the
rings.
Circling brightly outside the rings in the lower right of the image is
Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across). On the left of the image
is tiny Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across), a small gray dot cutting
through the Encke Gap of the outer A ring. Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19
miles across) is an even fainter dot orbiting between the A ring and the
thin F ring in the lower central part of the image.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 16
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 20, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (620,000
miles) from Atlas and at a Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33
degrees. Image scale is 64 kilometers (40 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.