A trio of moons hovers over Saturn’s rings during this pass taken by the Cassini spacecraft.

From left to right are the moons Dione, Tethys and petite Pandora, offering a satellite sampler of the Saturnian system.

At Dione, the remains of a 205-mile (330-kilometer) wide impact are can easily be spotted on the moons bottom right, while Tethys sports the scar-like Ithaca Chasm across its surface. Small Pandora only hints at the secrets locked within its surface.

While all three satellites appear in a line, appearances are deceiving. Only Dione and Pandora are on the near side of the rings and much closer to Cassini than the centrally situated Tethys, which sits on the rings’ far side.

For comparison’s sake, Dione is 700 miles (1,126 kilometers) wide, while Tethys is about 665 miles (1,071 kilometers) in diameter and Pandora a mere 52 miles (84 kilometers) wide.

Cassini snapped this image about 800,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Saturn at the time of this observation.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.