This sweeping view of Saturn's rings offers a look at how the planet's
moons help shape and maintain this structure, making Saturn the jewel of
the solar system.
Some of the bright lanes seen here within the main rings are due to
resonances with moons such as Mimas, Janus and Prometheus, whose gravity
nudges the orbits of the ring particles. These resonances can also cause
dark gaps in the rings, like the Cassini Division.
Clumps are visible in both the thin, outer F ring and the ringlets within
the Encke Gap; the latter is maintained by the presence of tiny Pan (20
kilometers, or 12 miles, across at left of center). The clumps result
from gravitational interactions of ring particles with the small moons
that orbit nearby. The structurally complex F ring is maintained by the
presence of the moons Prometheus and Pandora, not pictured (see PIA06595).
Pan also creates dark wakes, which can faintly be seen here immediately
interior to the inner edge of the Encke Gap.
The view is from beneath Saturn's ringplane, looking upward.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 24, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.7
million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 10
kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. Contrast was enhanced to improve the
visibility of faint objects in the scene.
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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, 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.
