Curving wakes perturb the edges of the Encke Gap in Saturn's A ring. The
culprit in their creation is the flying saucer-shaped moon Pan, shining
brightly within the gap.
Ahead of Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across at its widest point) are
two narrow ringlets sharing the Encke Gap.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 9
degrees above the ringplane. Saturn's F ring cuts across the lower right
corner of the scene.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 5, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (889,000 miles) from Pan and at a
Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale is 9
kilometers (5 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.