Faint ringlets abound in this view of Saturn's F and outer A rings. The F
ring presents its familiar irregularities near the ring's ansa, or
outermost edge. At lower right can be seen faint ringlets within the Encke
Gap.
The oblong moon Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) is overexposed
in this image, due to the long exposure time necessary to see fine detail
within the rings.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 1
degree above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 4, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (784,000 miles) from Pandora and
at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 10 degrees. 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.
