Five Orbs

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Caption:

Five moons -- dominated by Rhea in the foreground -- share this Cassini spacecraft view with Saturn's rings seen nearly edge-on.

Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is largest here and is closest to Cassini. Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across) can be seen just above the rings near the center of the image. Tiny Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) is just barely visible in the rings to the right of Dione. Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across) is to the right of the rings, and Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) is on the extreme right of the image.

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

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 11, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 61,000 kilometers (38,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 15 degrees. Scale on Rhea is 4 kilometers (2 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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