Contact: Preston DYches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

The Face-off

Caption: Dione and Tethys face each other across the gulf of Saturn's rings. Here, Cassini looks on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, 665 miles across, below) and the anti-Saturn side of Dione (1,126 kilometers, 700 miles across, above).

The dark groove in the rings is the Cassini Division.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on September 22, 2005, from a distance of approximately 860,000 kilometers (530,000 miles) from Dione. Tethys was on the far side of the rings, 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Cassini. The image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel on Dione and 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Tethys.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Usage Restrictions: Image is in the public domain. Appropriate credit is requested.