Three of Saturn's closest-orbiting moons are captured here, rounding the
rings.
From innermost to outermost are Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across),
Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) and Mimas (397 kilometers, or
247 miles across).
The F ring displays a double-banded structure here, along with its usual
squiggles and kinks. Near right, a faint ringlet can be observed within
the Encke Gap.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 4 degrees
below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 6, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 17 kilometers (10 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/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
