Cassini presents Saturn moon quintet

Cassini presents Saturn moon quintet
A quintet of Saturn's moons come together in the Cassini spacecraft's field of view for this portrait. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

(PhysOrg.com) -- With the artistry of a magazine cover shoot, NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this portrait of five of Saturn's moons poised along the planet's rings.

From left to right are Janus, Pandora, , Mimas and finally Rhea, bisected by the right side of the frame. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Rhea and 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Enceladus.

The image was taken in visible green light with the narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011. Image scale is about 4 miles (7 kilometers) per pixel on Rhea and 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel on Enceladus.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the 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. The 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.

Provided by JPL/NASA

Citation: Cassini presents Saturn moon quintet (2011, September 19) retrieved 28 March 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2011-09-cassini-saturn-moon-quintet.html
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