The best view of Saturn's rings in the ultraviolet indicates there is more
ice toward the outer part of the rings, than in the inner part, hinting at
the origins of the rings and their evolution.
Images taken during the Cassini spacecraft's orbital insertion on June 30
show compositional variation in the A, B and C rings. From the inside out,
the "Cassini Division" in faint red at left is followed by the A ring in
its entirety. The Cassini Division at left contains thinner, dirtier rings
than the turquoise A ring, indicating a more icy composition. The red
band roughly three-fourths of the way outward in the A ring is known as
the Encke gap.
The ring system begins from the inside out with the D, C, B and A rings
followed by the F, G and E rings. The red in the image indicates sparser
ringlets likely made of "dirty," and possibly smaller, particles than in
the icier turquoise ringlets.
This image was taken with the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph instrument,
which is capable of resolving the rings to show features up to 97
kilometers (60 miles) across, roughly 100 times the resolution of
ultraviolet data obtained by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science,
Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph was built at, and
the team is based at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Ultraviolet
Imaging Spectrograph team home page, http://lasp.colorado.edu/cassini/.
