THE BEGINNING

Ever since I started working for the University of Colorado, I am constantly amazed at the things our hardware is able to accomplish. One of the founding scientist who helped create the Cassini instrument was right across the hall from my office, and ever since it was deployed we've been enjoying the amazing images it has been providing from Saturn. 

The latest images are of a quintet of Saturn's moons that came together in the Cassini spacecraft's field of view for this photo.  This image looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. 


Rhea is closest to Cassini from this point of view. The rings are beyond Rhea and Mimas. Enceladus is beyond the rings.

Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is on the far left. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the image. 


Brightly reflective Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) appears above the center of the image. 


Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across), is bisected by the right edge of the image. 


The smaller moon Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) can be seen beyond Rhea also on the right side of the image.
This image was captured with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Rhea.


NASA's The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygensmission 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.