Tête-à-tête

Saturn’s moon Tethys disappears behind Titan as observed by Cassini on Nov. 26, 2009. Tethys is about 660 miles (1,070 kilometers) across. At about 3,200 miles (5,100 kilometers) wide, Titan is larger than the planet Mercury, and was much closer to Cassini than Tethys at the time of this image. Titan is planet-like in another way: it’s wrapped in a thick atmosphere, which can be clearly seen here where it overlaps icy Tethys in the distance beyond.

Cassini captured this natural-color image at a distance of approximately 620,000 miles (1 million kilometers) from Titan.

The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on Sept. 15, 2017.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and https://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.