The small ring moon Atlas is seen here, on the far side of Saturn's
immense ring system. Cassini was only 0.6 degrees above the ring plane
when this image was taken. Atlas is 32 kilometers (20 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 11, 2005, at a distance of approximately
1.5 million kilometers (957,000 miles) from Atlas and at a
Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 9 kilometers (6 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.