Cassini spacecraft spots a couple of large, wedge-shaped spokes in
Saturn's B ring.
pokes are similar in appearance to those seen by the Voyager spacecraft
(see PIA02275).
Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) can be spotted interior to
the narrow F ring at left. Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across at its
widest point) is barely visible within the Encke Gap, below center.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 26 degrees
below the ringplane. Pan has been brightened in this image for better
visibility. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 8, 2008. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 749,000 kilometers (465,000 miles) from Saturn
and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 31 degrees. Image scale
is 41 kilometers (26 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.