A Diverse Family

Saturn, Titan, Dione and Janus
August 13, 2007
PIA NumberPIA09004
Language
  • english

Three of Saturn's brood are captured near the rings in this view from the Cassini spacecraft. Together they showcase the rich variety of worlds found in the Saturn system.

Pictured here are: Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) at upper left, Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) at right and Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) just above the rings left of center.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2 degrees above the ringplane. The planet is overexposed in this view.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 24, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 183 kilometers (114 miles) per pixel on Titan, 132 kilometers (82 miles) per pixel on Dione and 115 kilometers (71 miles) per pixel at the distance of Janus.

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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute