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Star Companions

May 18, 2009
Atlas is seen in this image taken on March 23, 2009 by NASA's Cassini spacecraft with several background stars as the moon orbits within the Roche Division, the region between Saturn's A and F rings.

Atlas is seen in this image with several background stars as the moon orbits within the Roche Division— the region between Saturn's A and F rings.

Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across) is in the top left quadrant of the image. For higher-resolution images of this saucer shaped moon, see PIA08405.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 65 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 23, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 913,000 kilometers (567,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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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