This close-up of the lit side of Saturn's outer B ring and the Cassini
Division looks something like a phonograph record. There are subtle,
wavelike patterns, hundreds of narrow features resembling a record's
'grooves' and a noticeable abrupt change in overall brightness beyond the
dark gap near the right. To the left of the gap is the outer B ring with
its sharp edge maintained by a strong gravitational resonance with the
moon Mimas. To the right of the Huygens Gap are the plateau-like bands of
the Cassini Division. The narrow ringlet within the gap is called the
Huygens ringlet.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Oct. 29, 2004, at a distance of about 819,000 (509,000
miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 4.5 kilometers (2.8 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.