A grandiose gesture of gravity, Saturn's icy rings fan out across many
thousands of kilometers of space. The moon Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles
across) dutifully follows its path, like the billions and billions of
particles comprising the rings. The little moon is seen at the center of
this view, within the Encke gap.
The famous Cassini Division spans upper left corner of the scene. The
Cassini Division is approximately 4,800-kilometers-wide (2,980 miles) and
is visible in small telescopes from Earth.
The narrow, knotted F ring is thinly visible just beyond the main rings.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.1
million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale on
Pan is 13 kilometers (8 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
