Staring toward the outer edge of Saturn's main rings, the Cassini
spacecraft spots Pandora and tiny Atlas. Several clumps are visible in
the narrow F ring, as well as multiple dusty strands flanking the F ring
core.
Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) is seen here outside the F
ring, while Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across) is a mere dim pixel
just above the bright outer edge of the A ring.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 19, 2006, using a filter sensitive to
wavelengths of infrared light centered at 862 nanometers, and at a
distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from
Saturn. The image scale is 16 kilometers (10 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.