The Saturnian Sisters

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Caption:

Similar in many ways, Saturn's moons Tethys and Rhea (left and right, respectively) even share a discoverer: Giovanni Cassini, namesake of the NASA spacecraft that captured this view.

The moons are named for sisters -- two Titans of Greek mythology. Although somewhat different in size, Rhea (949 miles or 1,527 kilometers across) and Tethys (660 miles or 1,062 kilometers across) are medium-sized moons that are large enough to have pulled themselves into round shapes. They are both composed largely of ices and are generally thought to be geologically inactive today.

The view looks toward the anti-Saturn sides of Tethys and Rhea. North on both moons is up. The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2015.

The two moons appear close together here, but Tethys was about 220,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) farther away from Cassini when the image was captured -- nearly the distance from Earth to our moon. Thus, the view does not accurately reflect the bodies' relative sizes.

The image was obtained at a distance of approximately 708,000 miles (1.14 million kilometers) from Rhea. Image scale on Rhea is 4 miles (7 kilometers) per pixel. Tethys was 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away during this observation and has a pixel scale of 6 miles (9 kilometers) per pixel.

Background Info:

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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