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Beauty Marks

May 2, 2008
Two dark spots drift across the northern skies of Saturn in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The shadows are cast by the moons Tethys and Mimas. Tethys orbits farther from Saturn than Mimas and casts the larger of the two shadows here.

Two dark spots drift across the northern skies of Saturn. The shadows are cast by the moons Tethys and Mimas.

Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) orbits farther from Saturn than Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) and casts the larger of the two shadows here.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 46 degrees above the ringplane.The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 30, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (720,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 66 kilometers (41 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 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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