Saturnian Citizens

Cassini spies two icy denizens of the Saturn System as they hurtle past.

The view captures Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) at bottom, with Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across) about 48,000 kilometers (30,000 miles) farther beyond.

This scene looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 6, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Mimas. Image scale is approximately 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on both moons.

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