Two of Saturn's ring moons are captured in this Cassini spacecraft view,
along with the signature of another. This image was taken not long after
Prometheus passed, leaving a trail of dark gores in the inner edge of the
F ring.
Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) orbits Saturn about 4,090
kilometers (2,540 miles) closer than Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles
across), meaning that Pan orbits faster, always overtaking its slower
moving sibling.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 25
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 23, 2008. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1
million miles) from both moons. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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.
