Saturn’s Epimetheus, Going Rogue?

Although Epimetheus appears to be orbiting between the A and F rings in this image, it’s just an illusion! Epimetheus, which orbits Saturn well outside of the F ring’s orbit, is actually on the near side of Saturn to Cassini while the rings seen here are on the far side of the planet. Whew, that’s a relief!
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 3 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 15, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 70,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Epimetheus and at a Sun-Epimetheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Image scale is 4 miles (7 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 http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.