The Odd Trio
The Cassini spacecraft captures a rare family photo of three of Saturn's
moons that couldn't be more different from each other! As the largest of the
three, Tethys (image center) is round and has a variety of terrains across its
surface. Meanwhile, Hyperion (to the upper-left of Tethys) is the "wild one"
with a chaotic spin and Prometheus (lower-left) is a tiny moon that busies
itself sculpting the F ring.
To learn more about the surface of Tethys (660 miles, or 1,062 kilometers
across), see PIA17164.
More on the chaotic spin of Hyperion (168 miles, or 270 kilometers across) can
be found at PIA07683.
And discover more about the role of Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers
across) in shaping the F ring in PIA12786.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 1 degree above
the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 14, 2014.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (1.9
million kilometers) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 22 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) 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
The Cassini
imaging team homepage is at
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science
Institute
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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