Rings In Between

Saturn's rings lie between a pair of moons in this Cassini spacecraft view that features Mimas and Prometheus.

Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across) is the more noticeable of the two moons and is in the top left of the view. The smaller moon Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) is near the center of the image and is closest to Cassini. Mimas is beyond the rings and farthest from the spacecraft.

Lit terrain seen on Mimas is on the leading hemisphere of the moon. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 4, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 746,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Prometheus and 870,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) from Mimas. Image scale is 4 miles (7 kilometers) per pixel on Prometheus and 5 miles (8 kilometers) 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute