This close-up of the inner edge of the Cassini Division shows an enormous
amount of structure, including a grainy texture in the bright outer B ring
material near the gap edge.
An extreme enhancement of the original image, presented at right, reveals
the grainy region with greater clarity.
This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 54 degrees
below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Nov. 8, 2006 at a distance of approximately 378,000
kilometers (235,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 68 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.