Media Information

 
 
 
Collection:
NASA Cassini-Huygens Collection
Title:
Candle in the Dark
Description:
Candle in the Dark
Full Description:
Saturn's rings cut across an eerie scene that is ruled by Titan's luminous crescent and globe-encircling haze, broken by the small moon Enceladus, whose icy jets are dimly visible at its south pole. North is up.

The scattered light around planet-sized Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) makes the moon's solid surface visible in silhouette. Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) enjoys far clearer skies than its giant sibling moon.

This view shows the unlit side of Saturn's rings.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 10, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Enceladus and 5.3 million kilometers (3.3 million miles) from Titan. The view was obtained at a Sun-moon-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 160 degrees relative to both moons. Image scale is 23 kilometers (15 miles) per pixel on Enceladus and 32 kilometers (20 miles) 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 http://saturn.jpl.n…. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Date:
August 3, 2006
Keywords:
gallery
Keywords:
images
Keywords:
Cassini
Keywords:
mission
Keywords:
Huygens
Keywords:
probe
Keywords:
Saturn
Keywords:
explore
Keywords:
videos
Keywords:
movies
Keywords:
Jupiter
Keywords:
flyby
Keywords:
spacecraft
Keywords:
assembly
Keywords:
launch
Keywords:
flight
Keywords:
operations facilities
Keywords:
mpeg
Keywords:
Quicktime
facet_what:
Saturn
facet_what:
Cassini
facet_what:
Jupiter
facet_what:
Cassini-Huygens
facet_what:
Huygens Probe
facet_what:
Moon
facet_what:
Titan
facet_what:
Cassini Orbiter
facet_what:
Sun
facet_what:
Enceladus
facet_where:
Saturn
facet_where:
Jupiter
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
facet_where:
California
facet_where:
Washington
facet_where:
Enceladus
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
facet_where:
Washington, D.C.
facet_when:
June 10, 2006
facet_when:
August 3, 2006
facet_when_year:
2006
UID:
SPD-SATRN-2222
original url:

Candle in the Dark