Lonely Gem

Small, multi-faceted Epimetheus wanders into Cassini's field of view, while Saturn's dark shadow cuts across the ringplane. Only a sliver of the outer A ring is seen here, including the narrow Keeler Gap. Epimetheus is a moon that is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across.

This view is from 10 degrees out of the ringplane, gazing toward the lit face of the rings.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 31, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Epimetheus and at a Sun-Epimetheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.

For a much closer view of crater-pocked Epimetheus see this link

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