Cassini captures a gathering of three moons near the rings' outer edge as the icy worlds dutifully march about Saturn.
Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across) hangs in front of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) near left. Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across) skirts the outer edge of the F ring below center.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 2, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 3.7 million kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 22 kilometers (14 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: September 21, 2007 (PIA 09733)
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PIA 09733
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