As Cassini coasts into the final month of its nearly seven-year trek, the serene
majesty of its destination looms ahead. The spacecraft's cameras are
functioning beautifully and continue to return stunning views from
Cassini's position, 1.2 billion kilometers (750 million miles) from Earth
and now 15.7 million kilometers (9.8 million miles) from Saturn.
In this narrow angle camera image from May 21, 2004, the ringed planet
displays subtle, multi-hued atmospheric bands, colored by yet
undetermined compounds. Cassini mission scientists hope to determine the
exact composition of this material.
This image also offers a preview of the detailed survey Cassini will
conduct on the planet's dazzling rings. Slight differences in color
denote both differences in ring particle composition and light scattering
properties.
Images taken through blue, green and red filters were combined to create
this natural color view. The image scale is 132 kilometers (82 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.
