The dramatic plane of Saturn's rings is indeed a huge expanse. Gazing
straight across the vertical center of this view, the Cassini spacecraft
takes in more than 200,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) from one side of the
rings to the other.
Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across) is gliding past below center.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2
degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 24, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7
million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Atlas. Image scale is 10
kilometers (6 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.
