The ringed planet sits in repose, the center of its own macrocosm of many
rings and moons and one artificial satellite named Cassini. Mimas (397
kilometers, or 247 miles across) is visible at upper left. Although unseen
in this view, Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) casts its
shadow upon the planet. The rings also block the sun's light from the low
latitudes of the northern hemisphere.
During Cassini's extended mission, dubbed the Cassini Equinox Mission,
which begins on July 1, 2008, the ring shadows will slip past the planet's
equator and into the southern hemisphere as Saturn passes through its
northern vernal equinox on August 11, 2009, and the sun moves northward
through the ring plane.
This view looks down on the un-illuminated side of the rings from about 22
degrees above (north of) the ring plane. Images taken using red, green and
blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The
images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec.
16, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000
miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 86 kilometers (53 miles) 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://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.