Kingdom of Saturn

Saturn and three of its moons
PIA NumberPIA09732
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  • english

Saturn sits with its attendants in the icy depths of the outer Solar System.

Near the edge-on rings, moons visible from left to right: Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across), Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) and Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across). The ring shadow forms a headband crowning Saturn's northern hemisphere.

The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 8, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 244 kilometers (152 miles) per pixel.

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