Sunlight reflects off the bright, frozen surfaces of the billions and
billions of particles comprising Saturn's rings to brighten the planet's
southern skies.
The particles in Saturn's rings are each too small to be seen by Cassini
in this image. If they could, each would look like the bright reflective
crescent of Enceladus (505 kilometers, 314 miles across) seen here, with
each reflecting sunlight onto the southern hemisphere of the planet.
The image was taken in polarized infrared light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 2, 2005, at a distance of
approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn and
at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 119 degrees. The image
scale is 104 kilometers (65 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
