Clinging to the Rings (IMAGE)
Caption
This fortunate view sights along Saturn’s ringplane to capture three moons aligned in a row: Dione (1,126 kilometers, 700 miles across) at left, Prometheus (102 kilometers, 63 miles across) at center and Epimetheus (116 kilometers, 72 miles across) at right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 2, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 19 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel on Dione, and about 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Prometheus and Epimetheus.
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
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Image is in the public domain. Appropriate credit is requested.
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