Saturn's moon Pandora is almost overwhelmed by the brightness of the F
ring in this view. The F ring's bright core displays kinks and is flanked
by fainter ringlets. Imaging scientists recently determined these fainter
ringlets to be a single spiral ring that winds around the planet. Pandora
is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.
Pandora is faintly lit by "Saturnshine," or reflected light from the
planet, and few features can be seen here. This image was acquired by
Cassini exactly three hours after the spacecraft took the image seen in
PIA07601, which showed Prometheus interior to the F ring.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 21, 2005, at a distance of approximately
583,000 kilometers (362,000 miles) from Saturn and at a high
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 136 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 3 kilometers (2 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.
