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A pair of Saturn's moons appears as if hung below the planet's rings in this Cassini view.
Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) appears just below the rings here, near the center of the image. Tethys (1062 kilometers, 660 miles across) is near the bottom center of the image. Tethys is closer to Cassini than Enceladus is.
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 13, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 272,000 kilometers (169,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 135 degrees. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 208,000 kilometers (139,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 135 degrees. Image scale is 16 kilometers (10 miles) per pixel on Enceladus and 12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Tethys.
The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.