Any doubts about the grandeur of Saturn's rings will be dissolved by
sweeping portraits like this one from Cassini. There is a magnificent
level of detail visible in this view, which captures almost the entire
ring system -- from the thin, outer F ring to faint narrow features in
the D ring, interior to the C ring. Along the ringplane, differences in
brightness reveal the varying concentrations of the particles that
comprise the rings.
Cassini is viewing the rings from below. The portion of the rings near
the top of the image is closer to the spacecraft, and the portion near
the bottom is farther away.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera on Oct.
29, 2004, at a distance of about 836,000 (519,000 miles) from Saturn
through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at
742 nanometers. The image scale is 46 kilometers (29 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.
