Epimetheus and the Dark Side

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Caption:

Epimetheus is a lonely dot beyond Saturn's rings. The little moon appears at lower left, outside the narrow F ring.

Several very faint spokes lurk in the B ring, at right.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 49 degrees above the ringplane. Epimetheus is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 17, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 63 kilometers (39 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 .

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