For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage. The flyby had a close-approach distance of about 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers). The moon orbits Saturn every 13.8 hours from an average distance of 134,000 kilometers (80,150 miles), equivalent to about one-third the Earth-Moon distance, and just 73,000 miles from the Saturnian cloud tops), the 34x31x21-kilometer moon carves out the Encke Gap in Saturn's outermost bright A Ring. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.įor more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit. These raw, unprocessed images of Saturns moon, Atlas, were taken on April 12, 2017, by NASAs Cassini spacecraft. It seems fitting that they should do so since in Greek mythology, their namesakes were brothers. Discovery Saturn ( overexposed) and the moons Iapetus, Titan, Dione, Hyperion, and Rhea viewed through a 12.5-inch telescope Early observations Before the advent of telescopic photography, eight moons of Saturn were discovered by direct observation using optical telescopes. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. Saturns small moons Atlas, Prometheus, and Epimetheus keep each other company in this Cassini spacecraft image of the planets night side. 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-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Resolution in the original image was 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 25, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Atlas and at a Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees. The bright outer edge of the A ring is overexposed here, but farther down the image several bright ring features can be seen. Atlas is 32 kilometers (20 miles) across. Orbiting amongst the rings of Saturn are small (r < 100 km) ring-moons (yellow points in Figure 17 Table S1 in Supporting Information S1), including Methone, Atlas, Pan, etc. This image just barely resolves the disk of Atlas, and also shows some of the knotted structure for which the F ring is known. Cassini had noticed that he could only see one side of the moon, leading him to the correct conclusion that one side of the moon is covered in some kind of dark material. Sometimes called the yin and yang of Saturn, Iapetus was discovered by Giovanni Cassini in 1671.

Saturn's little moon Atlas orbits Saturn between the outer edge of the A ring and the fascinating, twisted F ring. Saturn’s Moon Iapetus Iapetus is one of the many unique moons of Saturn.

Saturn moon atlas