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Off Saturn's Shoulder

Dec. 12, 2007
NASA's Cassini spacecraft spies Enceladus and Epimetheus near the limb of Saturn. Geologically active Enceladus is 505 kilometers across; smaller, more irregularly shaped Epimetheus is 116 kilometers across.

The Cassini spacecraft spies Enceladus and Epimetheus near the limb of Saturn.

Geologically active Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across; smaller, more irregularly shaped Epimetheus is 116 kilometers (72 miles) across.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 27, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (857,000 miles) from Enceladus. Epimetheus is 91,000 kilometers (57,000 miles) farther away from Cassini here. Image scale is about 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on both moons.

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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