Saturn's faintly banded atmosphere is delicately colored and its
threadbare rings cross their own shadows in this marvelous natural color
view from Cassini.
The planet and its rings would nearly fill the space between Earth and
the Moon. Yet, despite their great breadth, the rings are a few meters
thick and in some places, very translucent. In this image, we can see
through the C ring, which is closest to Saturn, and through the Cassini
division, the 4,800-kilometer- (2,980-mile-) wide gap that arcs across
the top of the image and separates the optically thick B ring from the A
ring. The part of the atmosphere seen through the gap appears darker and
more bluish due to scattering at blue wavelengths by the cloud-free upper
atmosphere.
The different colors in Saturn's atmosphere are due to particles whose
composition is yet to be determined.
The image was obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
July 30, 2004, at a distance of 7.6 million kilometers (4.7 million miles)
from Saturn. Images taken with red, green and blue filters were combined
to create this color view. The image scale is 46 kilometers (28 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.
