Looking Down on Epimetheus

From 34 degrees above Saturn's equatorial plane, Cassini gazed down at Saturn's moon Epimetheus. The region seen here includes territory farther north and east than that imaged in March 2005 (see Up-Close and Colorful ).

The two largest craters visible here are the only officially named features on Epimetheus. The crater at the left (at about the 9 o'clock position) is named Pollux; the crater at lower left (containing a string of several smaller craters) is called Hilairea. Epimetheus is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 14, 2005, at a distance of approximately 87,000 kilometers (54,000 miles) from Epimetheus and at a Sun-Epimetheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 95 degrees. The image scale is 520 meters (1,710 feet) 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