Only Cassini could provide this enchanting, natural color view of crescent
Saturn, which gazes down onto the unlit side of the planet's spectacular
rings. The robotic ship plies the peaceful black seas around the ringed
giant, searching for answers to the many questions posed by the
inquisitive minds of Earth.
This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 19 degrees
above the ringplane. The view of Saturn is through the dark rings at
bottom; the rings cast shadows onto the northern hemisphere at top.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 4, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn and at
a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 97
kilometers (61 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.
