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Gallery – Saturn’s four moon shuffle

Four of Saturn's moons are visible in the image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

A QUARTET OF SATURN’S MOONS, from tiny to huge, surround and are embedded within the planet’s rings in this Cassini image. Saturn itself is out of frame to the left.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan (5,150 kilometres wide), is in the background of the image.

Next, in the foreground is Dione (1,123 kilometres wide), with the wispy terrain on its trailing hemisphere easily visible.

The third moon is Pandora(81 kilometres wide), which orbits just beyond the rings on the right of the image.

The tiny moon Pan appears as a speck in the gap in the rings.

Finally, tiny Pan (28 kilometres wide) can just be seen as a tiny speck in the ‘Encke Gap’ of the A ring on the left of the image.

Saturn has 62 known moons, with the vast majority of them being 50 kilometres or less in diameter.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on September 17, 2011, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometres from Dione.

Adapted from information issued by NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.

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