Color Between Moons

Two of Saturn's moons straddle the planet's rings in this color view.

Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) is closest to the Cassini spacecraft here. Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across) is on the far side of the rings. Saturn's shadow cuts across the middle of the rings. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 24, 2009 at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Epimetheus and 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Mimas. Scale on Mimas is 14 kilometers (9 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