"It's full of stars!" the character Bowman proclaimed in 2001: A Space
Odyssey. This Cassini spacecraft view evokes the exclamation, "It's
full of moons!"
Saturn possesses no less than 52 officially named satellites. Nine of them
crowd around the ring system in this image, though some are too faint to
see.
Starting in the lower left, Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across)
appears largest and closest to the viewer. Janus (179 kilometers, or 111
miles across) is also in the lower left but is closer to the rings.
Following the edge of the rings toward the right of the image, Pandora (81
kilometers, or 50 miles across) is below center-right, outside the rings.
One of the shepherds of the F ring—Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53
miles across) —can be seen on the far right of the image, just
inside the faint F ring. Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across) is also
on the far right, above the horizontal center of the image. It has been
brightened to make it visible.
Those with a careful eye may be able to see Pan (28 kilometers, or 17
miles across) cutting through the thin black line of the Encke Gap. Pan
and Helene have both been brightened to make them visible, but they each
only comprise one pixel in the image. Helene (33 kilometers, or 21 miles
across) is located at the bottom of the image, to the left of the vertical
center.
Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) and Pallene (4 kilometers, or 3
miles across) are present in this view but are not visible at this
resolution.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec.
13, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 918 nanometers.The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 1.181 million kilometers (734,000 miles) from Saturn and at
a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 67
kilometers (42 miles) per pixel.
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.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
