Pan coasts down its private highway within the Encke Gap.
The process by which Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across) maintains the
gap, clearing the neighborhood around its orbit, is believed to be similar
to the way that planets clear gaps in debris disks around young stars.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 11
degrees above the ringplane.
The limb of Saturn is seen through the rings at upper left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 24, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (784,000 miles) from Pan. 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.