Parade of Moons

The Cassini spacecraft captures a gathering of three moons near the rings' outer edge as the icy worlds dutifully march about Saturn.

Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) hangs in front of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) near left. Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) skirts the outer edge of the F ring below center.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 2, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 3.7 million kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 22 kilometers (14 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