Media Information

 
 
 
Collection:
NASA Cassini-Huygens Collection
Title:
Shadowing Saturn
Description:
Like a silvery pearl, an icy moon crosses the face of Saturn, while two of its siblings cast shadows onto the planet.
Full Description:
Like a silvery pearl, an icy moon crosses the face of Saturn, while two of its siblings cast shadows onto the planet.

Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) hangs in the foreground. Near upper left on Saturn is the small shadow of Mimas. Near lower right is the penumbral shadow of Iapetus -- the part of the moon's shadow where Iapetus does not completely block the sun.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane. The rings' shadows drape across the northern hemisphere. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 15, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (744,000 miles) from Rhea and 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 71 kilometers (44 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 103 kilometers (64 miles) on Saturn.

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:
October 15, 2007
Keywords:
Saturn
Keywords:
Rhea
Keywords:
Mimas
facet_what:
Saturn
facet_what:
Cassini
facet_what:
Cassini-Huygens
facet_what:
Huygens Probe
facet_what:
Moon
facet_what:
Cassini Orbiter
facet_what:
Rhea
facet_what:
Sun
facet_what:
Iapetus
facet_what:
Mimas
facet_where:
Saturn
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
facet_where:
California
facet_where:
Washington
facet_where:
Rhea
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
facet_where:
Washington, D.C.
facet_when:
June 15, 2007
facet_when:
October 15, 2007
facet_when_year:
2007
UID:
SPD-SATRN-2795
original url:

Shadowing Saturn