Circling Satellites

Saturn looks on as three moons round the rings.

From farthest to nearest the Cassini spacecraft: Tethys (1071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) is seen above the rings. Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) lies immediately outside the edge of the narrow F ring. Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) floats beneath the rings' edge.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 6, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 141 kilometers (88 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute