Saucer-shaped Pan glides through the Encke Gap in Saturn's rings.
See PIA08405 for higher resolution views of the "saucer moons" Pan
(28 kilometers, or 17 miles across at its widest point) and Atlas (30
kilometers, or 19 miles across at its widest point).
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 20 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible green light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 10, 2008 at a distance of
approximately 799,000 kilometers (496,000 miles) from Pan. Image scale is
5 kilometers (3 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.