Art and Science

Saturn's moons Titan and Dione
March 17, 2005
PIA NumberPIA06607
Language
  • english

As artful as it is informative, this captivating portrait captures Saturn's wispy moon Dione over the shoulder of smoggy Titan in a single inspiring scene. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across and Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Dione and 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Titan. The image scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on Dione, and 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Titan.

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