The "flying saucer" in this image is the small moon Atlas (20 kilometers,
12 miles across), whose shadowy profile reveals its flattened shape. This
image looks down onto the outer A ring, and through the Encke and Keeler
gaps.
Two distinct, thin strands in the F ring are visible here, silhouetted
against the planet. Saturn's extended, high-altitude haze is seen near
lower right.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 2, 2005, at a distance of approximately
489,000 kilometers (304,000 miles) from Atlas and at a
Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 138 degrees. The image scale is
3 kilometers (2 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.