Saturn wears a halo of four moons in this wide angle camera image taken by the Cassini spacecraft on August 18, 2004.
Satellites visible in this image are (clockwise from upper left): Tethys (1060 kilometers, or 659 miles wide); Dione (1118 kilometers or 695 miles wide); Enceladus (499 kilometers or 310 miles wide); and Mimas (398 kilometers or 247 miles wide).
The image was taken in visible red light at a distance of 8.9 million kilometers (5.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 529 kilometers (329 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 Cassini-Huygens 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
