• NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

    The Cassini spacecraft captured this view of five Saturnian moons, plus the planet's rings, in this image from July 29. Janus is on the far left. Pandora orbits between two of the rings near the middle of the image. Brightly reflective Enceladus appears above the center of the image. Rhea is bisected by the image's right edge, and Mimas can be seen beyond Rhea, just to its left. Saturn itself is not visible in this view ... only its rings.

    Saturnian moons merge into a quintet

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    Five Saturnian moons are clustered around the giant planet's rings in this amazing view from the Cassini orbiter, captured on July 29 from a vantage point just above the ring plane. Rhea, which is poking in from the far right side of the frame, is the moon closest to the camera, at a distance of 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers). That moon is 949 miles (1,528 kilometers) across. The smaller moon Mimas looks as if it's edging up right beside Rhea, but it's actually more than 400,000 miles farther away. The bright moon Enceladus, which spouts geysers of water ice, shines above and beyond Saturn's rings.

    Fifty-mile-wide Pandora, a shepherd moon and the smallest of the five satellites seen in this picture, is nestled within Saturn's rings, between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the image. The irregular moon Janus is at far left. These five are just a small part of Saturn's huge chorus of 62 known moons.

    The bus-sized Cassini probe was launched back in 1997 and has been sending pictures back from Saturn and its moons since 2004, but it's still going strong. For more from the Cassini mission, check out the imaging team's home page, NASA's Cassini website and our own slideshow of the mission's greatest hits. Here's a little bit extra about each of the moons seen in this picture:

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