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Amazing Icy Moons

May 5, 2005
A scene straight out of science fiction, this fantastic view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows, from left to right, Saturn's moon's Mimas, Dione and Rhea, on the far side of Saturn's nearly edge-on rings.

A scene straight out of science fiction, this fantastic view shows, from left to right, Saturn's moon's Mimas, Dione and Rhea, on the far side of Saturn's nearly edge-on rings.

The trailing hemispheres of all three moons are sunlit here, and wispy markings can be seen on the limbs of both Dione and Rhea. The diameter of Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles), Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) and Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles).

The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 15, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel.

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

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