Squinting at this view of Saturn's rings reveals not one but two of the
four narrow ringlets in the Encke Gap (325 kilometers, or 200 miles,
wide). The innermost of the two ringlets is much brighter and full of
clumps.
The complicated and dynamic features in the Encke Gap are extensively
influenced by the presence of Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles, across),
which orbits in the center of the gap. The Encke Gap may contain other
small moonlets, which imaging team members hope to discover in the future.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Aug. 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately
273,000 kilometers (170,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale 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.
