Space Topics: Saturn
The Year in Pictures: 2007
The View from Iapetus
Saturn family portrait (or, the view from Iapetus)
Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI
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On September 10 Cassini was
reaching the end of an unusually long orbit from Saturn in order to fly past Iapetus.
Just before the Iapetus encounter began it turned back to take in the rest
of the Saturn system from a distance of roughly three million kilometers
(two million miles), capturing all at once a view of the planet, its rings,
and all its major moons (except
Iapetus, which was still on the opposite side of Cassini). From left to
right, the moons are: Dione; Enceladus (just to the left of the rings); Mimas (just above the rings in front of the ring shadow on the left side of Saturn);
Rhea (at roughly 11:00 at the edge of Saturn's disk); Tethys (to the right
of and slightly above the rings); and finally orange Titan (lower right).
Only Titan is large enough to be easily visible in the browse version of
the image shown above; you must click to enlarge to reveal the others.
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