The sharp outer boundary of Saturn's B ring, which is the bright ring region seen to the right in this image, is maintained by
a strong resonance with the moon Mimas. For every two orbits made by
particles at this distance from Saturn, Mimas makes one orbit. The moon's
repeated gravitational tugs force ring particles away from this region.
The dark region is called the Huygens gap and it includes the bright,
eccentric Huygens ringlet, also visible here near center.
See PIA06535 for a wide-field view of this
region.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 23, 2006. The view was obtained from 15
degrees beneath the ringplane and at a distance of approximately 282,000
kilometers (175,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6
mile) 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.
