PIA09754: Shadowplay


Shadowplay

Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft looks upward from beneath the ringplane to spy the moon Mimas floating above the shadowed cloudtops of the Saturnian north.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 5 degrees below the ringplane. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across. The rings themselves produce the shadows which, from this perspective, appear to overlay.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 18, 2007, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3.4 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 20 kilometers (13 miles) per pixel.

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 .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn Rings Mimas, Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Ring Planet, Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Infrared, Shadow, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2007-10-22
Date in Caption
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09754
Identifier PIA09754