Cut by Saturn’s Shadow

Saturn's rings, partially darkened by the planet's shadow, cut a striking figure before Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

The night side of the planet is to the left, out of the frame of the image. Illuminated Titan can be seen above, below and through gaps in the rings. The moon Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) is near the bottom of the image. Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across) can barely be detected near the thin F ring just to the right of center on the upper part of the ring.

Lit terrain seen here is the area between the leading hemisphere and Saturn-facing side of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across). This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 26, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Titan and 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Mimas. Image scale is 21 kilometers (13 miles) per pixel on Titan and 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Mimas.

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