As seen from the side not illuminated by the Sun, Saturn's thinner rings are highlighted in
shades of brown and gold, contrasting with the more neutral appearance of the icy moon
Tethys. The A ring and Cassini Division are separated by the optically thick B ring, which
does not permit sunlight to penetrate and appears as the broad, dark lane between them in
this view.
This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles
across). North is up and rotated 35 degrees to the right.
The view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2 degrees above
the ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this
natural color view. The view was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle
camera on Oct. 29, 2007, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3
million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees.
Image scale is 12 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/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
