This majestic view of Saturn captures several phenomena of interest to
scientists working on the Cassini mission. The planet's nighttime
atmosphere looms ahead -- an excellent place to search for storms and
lightning. Saturn's shadow stretches across the rings, which will over
the next four years receive their most thorough examination since Galileo
discovered them in 1610. And barely visible near lower right just inside
the F ring, is the small shepherd moon Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63
miles across). Researchers will explore the many moons of Saturn,
including special ones like Prometheus that help maintain some of the
rings and gaps in this complex and dynamic system.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide
angle camera on Oct. 29, 2004, at a distance of about 940,000 kilometers
(584,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 52 kilometers (33 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras,
were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based
at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.