Immense Saturn is visible through the A ring as Pan coasts along its
private corridor.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 24
degrees above the ringplane. Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across)
drifts through the Encke Gap (325 kilometers, or 200 miles wide).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 23, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.6
million kilometers (1 million miles) from Pan. Image scale is 10
kilometers (6 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.