Media Information

 
 
 
Collection:
NASA Cassini-Huygens Collection
Title:
Moons in the Night
Description:
Moons in the Night
Full Description:
Sunlight makes visible the faint band called the E ring as two moons meet in the sky.

Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) and Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) appear close together in the sky in this image, but in reality, Tethys was more than 260,000 kilometers (162,000 miles) farther from the Cassini spacecraft -- greater than half the distance from Earth to the Moon. Enceladus is easy to identify by the brilliant plume of ice erupting from its south pole.

Although this perspective views the night sides of both moons, the Sun is not the only source of illumination in the Saturn system. Tethys is at a fuller phase with respect to Saturn, and thus its "night side" is more fully lit than that of Enceladus.

The view was acquired from a Sun-Enceladus-spacec raft, or phase, angle of 163 degrees, a viewing geometry in which the microscopic ice particles in its plume brighten substantially.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 6, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Enceladus and 4.2 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Tethys. Image scale is 23 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Enceladus and 25 kilometers (16 miles) on Tethys.

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:
April 16, 2007
Keywords:
gallery
Keywords:
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Keywords:
Cassini
Keywords:
mission
Keywords:
Huygens
Keywords:
probe
Keywords:
Saturn
Keywords:
explore
Keywords:
videos
Keywords:
movies
Keywords:
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Keywords:
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Keywords:
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Keywords:
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Keywords:
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Keywords:
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Keywords:
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Keywords:
mpeg
Keywords:
Quicktime
facet_what:
Saturn
facet_what:
Cassini
facet_what:
Jupiter
facet_what:
Cassini-Huygens
facet_what:
Earth
facet_what:
Huygens Probe
facet_what:
Moon
facet_what:
Cassini Orbiter
facet_what:
Sun
facet_what:
Visible Light
facet_what:
Tethys
facet_what:
Enceladus
facet_where:
Saturn
facet_where:
Jupiter
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
facet_where:
California
facet_where:
Washington
facet_where:
Tethys
facet_where:
Enceladus
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
facet_where:
Washington, D.C.
facet_when:
June 6, 2006
facet_when:
April 16, 2007
facet_when_year:
2006
facet_when_year:
2007
UID:
SPD-SATRN-2573
original url:

Moons in the Night