PIA 09753
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Cassini snapped this Saturn portrait from the distance of Iapetus, just before beginning its close encounter with the two-toned moon.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) is visible against the clouds of the northern hemisphere. Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across) stands out as a bright speck against the dark ring shadows, near center.
Enceladus is not pictured here, although it casts its shadow upon the northern hemisphere, to the left of Rhea.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 4 degrees below the ringplane. The rings disappear into the planet's shadow at right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 3.3 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 195 kilometers (121 miles) per pixel on the planet.
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: October 19, 2007 (PIA 09753)
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