The Cassini spacecraft spies an intriguing bright clump in Saturn's F
ring. Also of interest is the dark gash that appears to cut through the
ring immediately below the clump. Scientists continue to monitor this ring
for small, transient clumps of material, as well as the effects of the
shepherd moon Prometheus.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 28
degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 5, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.1
million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 12
kilometers (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 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.
