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5 Saturn-noons captured in one image
Monday, 19 September 2011 12:37
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Solar system - Saturn

A quintet of Saturn's moons come together in the Cassini spacecraft's field of view for this portrait.

Janus (179 km across) is on the far left. Pandora (81 km across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the image. Brightly reflective Enceladus (504 km across) appears above the center of the image. Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea (1.528 km across), is bisected by the right edge of the image. The smaller moon Mimas (396 km across) can be seen beyond Rhea also on the right side of the image.

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. Rhea is closest to Cassini here. The rings are beyond Rhea and Mimas. Enceladus is beyond the rings.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1,1 million km from Rhea and 1,8 million km from Enceladus. Image scale is 7 km/per pixel on Rhea and 11 km/pixel on Enceladus.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

Source: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.