The Cassini orbiter used its narrow angle camera to photograph Saturn’s moon Tethys from this interesting angle, at a distance of 1.8 million kilometers. In this picture the 1,062 kilometer wide icy moon appears to be hanging off of Saturn’s A and F rings. Along with the bright white Saturn-facing hemisphere of Tethys, we also get to see how flat Saturn’s rings really are – supposedly only approximately 10 meters high/thick while being 300,000 kilometers across.
A rare feat from the Cassini spacecraft as it captured three of Saturn’s moons (and its mystical rings) in this one frame. The largest of the visible moons in this picture is Tethys whose muti-terrain surface can be barely made out at this resolution. To the left of Tethys is the smaller and distant moon Hyperion. It has a surface full of closely packed and deeply etched pits and is an irregularly shaped moon of Saturn. Lastly we can barely see the tiny moon Prometheus (only 86 kilometers across) as it lies at Saturn’s F ring. This visible light picture was taken by Cassini’s narrow-angle camera while the spacecraft was around 1.9 million kilometers from Tethys.
It may be hard to spot it, but the tiny white dot in the lower right part of the photo is Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons. Discovered by William Herschel in 1789, Mimas is named after the son of Gaia in Greek mythology. The Cassini Orbiter took this picture using its wide angle camera at a distance of over a million miles. And the bright speck that is Mimas just happened to be perfectly positioned against the shadow of Saturn’s rings. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane.
It must be a human tendency to name regions based on known areas on Earth, as Baghdad and Damascus show up on this depiction of the southern pole of Saturn’s moon – Enceladus. These Cassini survey images of the south pole, taken with Cassini’s narrow-angle camera, look across the region of Enceladus’ geyser basin and down on the ends of the Baghdad and Damascus fractures that face Saturn. The segments with these geysers with fractures seen in these images, are among the most active and warmest in the region
The narrow angle camera on-board the Cassini orbiter took this picture of Saturn’s moon Enceldaus as it was looking across the moon’s south pole. The geyser basin includes three fractures that have been identified (and named) by various scientists and which provide us with this “light show” of jets escaping from the geysers.
