Belittled Moon

May 14, 2009

Although Epimetheus appears to be lurking above the rings here, it's actually just an illusion resulting from NASA's Cassini spacecraft viewing angle on July 26, 2015. In reality, Epimetheus and the rings both orbit in Saturn's equatorial plane.

The battered moon Epimetheus is dwarfed by Saturn in this image which shows a fraction of the planet's northern hemisphere.

This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across). The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 10, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Epimetheus and at a Sun-Epimetheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 42 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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.

Belittled Moon

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