Tethys Meets Dione

This image shows Saturn's moon Tethys partially occulting the moon Dione. The difference in the surface brightness of the two moons is immediately apparent.

The diameter of Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles), while Dione is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles) across.

This still image was acquired on Sept. 16, 2005, at a distance of 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Dione and 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Tethys. Resolution in the original images was 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Dione and 16 kilometers (10 miles) per pixel on Tethys. The still image was magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility of surface features.

A brief movie of is also available (see PIA07620).

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 .