The Cassini spacecraft gazes toward the multiple strands of the
ever-changing F ring, also sighting Atlas at its station just beyond the A
ring edge.
A few faint background stars are visible in the image. Atlas, which
appears left of center, is 32 kilometers (20 miles across).
This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 58 degrees
above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 10, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7
million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Atlas and at a
Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 128 degrees. Image scale is 10
kilometers (6 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.