The Cassini spacecraft stares at the Huygens Gap— the region between
Saturn's outer B ring and the ringlets of the prominent Cassini Division—in
this high-resolution view.
Ring scientists think that the scrambled pattern seen here in the B ring's
outer edge might represent gravitational clumping of particles there—that
is, the self-gravity of groups of particles orbiting together makes them
form clumps.
The outer B ring edge (at left) is maintained by a resonance with the moon
Mimas.
The clumping feature may be due to the fact that this region is compressed
periodically, owing to perturbations by Mimas. Cassini will take
additional images of this region as researchers continue to investigate
the interesting feature.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 43 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 28, 2008. The view was obtained at
a distance of approximately 246,000 kilometers (153,000 miles) above the
rings and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 84 degrees. Image
scale is about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 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.