Moons Small to Large

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Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft views Saturn with a selection of its moons in varying sizes.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is in the center of the image. Titan is 5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles, across. The smaller moon Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) is on the far right, appearing just below the rings. The tiny moon Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) is barely detectable as a speck on the far left, beyond the thin F ring. To enhance visibility, Pandora has been brightened by a factor of two relative to the rest of the image.

This view looks toward anti-Saturn side of Titan and toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 15, 2011 using a combination of polarized and spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 844,000 kilometers (524,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 78 degrees. Image scale is 50 kilometers (31 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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