Space Image: Welcome disruption

(PhysOrg.com) -- The line of Saturn's rings disrupts the Cassini spacecraft's view of the moons Tethys and Titan.

Larger Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across) is on the left. Tethys (660 miles, or 1,062 kilometers across) is near the center of the image. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing sides of Tethys and Titan. The angle also shows the northern, sunlit side of the rings from less than one degree above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 7, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.2 million kilometers) from Tethys and 1.9 million miles (3.1 million kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 8 miles (13 kilometers) per pixel on Tethys and 12 miles (19 kilometers) on Titan.

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 on-board cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.