Saturn’s Derby

A string of three of Saturn's icy moons encircles the planet in this Cassini image.

Visible here are: Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) near lower right; Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) below the F ring; and Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) at lower left.

The scene has been brightened to increase the moons' visibility.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 25, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 141 kilometers (87 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute