Saturn's moon Pan occupies the Encke Gap at the center of this image,
which also displays some of the A ring's intricate wave structure. Pan is
26 kilometers (16 miles) across.
The two most prominent bright banded features seen on the left side of
the image are spiral density waves, which propagate outward through
Saturn's rings. The bright crests represent areas with higher ring
particle densities.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately
794,000 kilometers (493,000 miles) from Pan. The image scale is 5
kilometers (3 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
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