Saturn's brilliant limb shines through the semi-transparent A ring, while
the outer F ring shepherd moon hangs against the black sky.
F-ring shepherding moon Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across), along
with the inner shepherd moon Prometheus (see PIA09887), helps to keep the
narrow lanes of the F ring in check.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 15
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 5, 2008. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (814,000
miles) from Pandora. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.
