Even from afar, Cassini's cameras reveal a tremendous amount of detail in
the planet's rings. The punctuated detail in the C ring, the bright fine
structure in the B ring, the dark bands within the Cassini Division, the
bland nature of the outermost A ring, as well as knots in the twisted F
ring, are all visible. The moon Tethys (1,060 kilometers, or 659 miles,
across) hovers beyond the rings at the top.
This image was taken from beneath the ring plane in visible green light
with the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera on Nov. 1, 2004, at a
distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles)
from Saturn. The image scale is 129 kilometers (80 miles) per pixel.
This image has been slightly contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.
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 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.
