Moon Harvest

Three of Saturn's brood hurtle around the vast icy disk of its rings.

Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) hangs at the top of this view, with its large crater Herschel in view; Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) lies outside the narrow F ring at right; and centered between the F and A rings at bottom is little Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across).

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 5 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 19, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Mimas, on which the image scale is 19 kilometers (12 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