Stunning Vistas

 

The Cassini spacecraft delivers this stunning vista showing small,

battered Epimetheus and smog-enshrouded Titan, with Saturn's A and F

rings stretching across the scene.

 

 

The prominent dark region visible in the A ring is the Encke Gap, in

which the moon Pan and several narrow ringlets reside. Moon-driven

features that mark the A ring are easily seen to the left and right of

the Encke Gap. The Encke Gap is 325 kilometers (200 miles) wide. Pan is

26 kilometers (16 miles) across.

 

 

In an optical illusion, the narrow F ring, outside the A ring, appears to

fade across the disk of Titan. A couple of bright clumps can be seen in

the F ring.

 

 

Epimetheus is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across and giant Titan is 5,150

kilometers (3,200 miles) across.

 

 

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft

narrow-angle camera on April 28, 2006, at a distance of approximately

667,000 kilometers (415,000 miles) from Epimetheus and 1.8 million

kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Titan. The image captures the

illuminated side of the rings. The image scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles)

per pixel on Epimetheus and 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Titan.

 

 

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

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team

homepage is at ciclops.org.

 

 

credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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