Crowded Sky

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Caption:

A string of icy moons stretches across the Saturn system in this view from nearly edge-on with the ringplane.

Nearest to the Cassini spacecraft is Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) below center; then little Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across), huddled close to the narrow F ring. Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) floats in the distance beyond.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 8, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 19 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel on Dione.

Background Info:

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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