Catalog Page for PIA08161

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PIA08161: Worlds in Orbit

Three of Saturn's moons are captured with the planet in this exquisite family portrait. At top, Saturn is bedecked with the shadows of its innermost rings as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Target Name:	Saturn
Is a satellite of:	Sol (our sun)
Mission:	Cassini-Huygens
Spacecraft:	Cassini Orbiter
Instrument:	ISS - Narrow Angle
Product Size:	1024 x 1024 pixels (w x h)
Produced By:	Cassini Imaging Team
Primary Data Set:	Cassini
Full-Res TIFF:	PIA08161.tif (1.05 MB)
Full-Res JPEG:	PIA08161.jpg (23.15 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Three of Saturn's moons are captured with the planet in this exquisite family portrait. At top, Saturn is bedecked with the shadows of its innermost rings.

Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) appears at lower right, closest to Cassini. Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) and Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) are on the far side of the immense ringed planet. Mimas is just about to slip behind Saturn.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 13, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is about 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Janus and Mimas, and 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Tethys.

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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:

2006-04-20