Click on the image for movie of
Surging Onward
A brilliant spot of sunlight, the opposition effect, travels outward
across the rings as the Cassini spacecraft orbits Saturn. This surge in
ring brightness is created around the point directly opposite the Sun from
the spacecraft.
This movie sequence of 29 images shows the opposition surge moving from
the outer B ring, across the sparsely populated Cassini Division and onto
the A ring. From Cassini's perspective, the rings are seen projected onto
the planet where the ring shadows can be seen through the rings. This
perspective, including rings and ring shadows, changes continuously during
the sequence, giving the false impression that the ring features
themselves are changing.
This image sequence was taken over 15 minutes on Aug. 16, 2006. The images
were acquired in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle
camera at a distance of approximately 253,000 kilometers (157,000 miles)
from Saturn. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 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.
