Quintet of moons
Copyright: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Five moons pose for the international Cassini spacecraft to create this beautiful portrait with Saturn’s rings.
This view, from 29 July 2011, looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.
At
the far right, and obscuring Saturn itself, is the planet’s second
largest moon Rhea, which spans 1528 km. Rhea is closest to Cassini in
this composition, at a distance of 1.1 million kilometres. Its heavily
cratered surface bears witness to a violent history, with many craters
overlapping or erasing the traces of older impact events.
The
nearly 400 km-wide Mimas lies just beyond, and seemingly levitates just
above Saturn’s innermost rings. The outline of the moon’s large,
distinguishing crater Herschel is partially covered by Rhea, but can
just be made out along with numerous smaller craters.
Brightly
reflective Enceladus appears above the centre of the image and lies
beyond the rings, at a distance of 1.8 million kilometres from Cassini.
Although not visible in this image, icy Enceladus is covered with a
network of frozen ridges and troughs, with plumes of ice particles
jetting from fissures in its southern hemisphere.
To the lower
left, tiny Pandora, just 81 km across, appears skewered by Saturn’s
outer rings – in fact, it orbits between the planet’s A and F rings.
Last
but not least, the irregularly shaped Janus lies at the far left of the
image, several shadowy surface markings corresponding to large impact
craters.
The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative project of
NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate,
Washington DC, USA.
Source: ESA
