The Cassini spacecraft spies the small moon Atlas, accompanied by bright
clumps of material in the F ring, as it gazes down at the unilluminated
side of the rings.
This view looks toward the rings from about 4 degrees above the ringplane.
Atlas is a mere 32 kilometers (20 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Oct. 1, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 532,000 kilometers (330,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees at the center of this
view. Image scale is about 30 kilometers (18 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.