Two small moons race across the face of Saturn. The planet's icy rings
cast dark shadows onto the feathery clouds below.
Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) appears above the rings near
center. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) is slightly closer to
Saturn, to the left of Janus.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 7 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on June 18, 2008 using a combination of spectral filters
sensitive to wavelengths of polarized infrared light centered at 752 and
705 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1
million kilometers (683,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 62
kilometers (39 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.