A small ring-embedded moon coasts into view from behind shadow-draped Saturn. The
rings' image is distorted near Saturn by the planet's upper atmosphere, to the right of Pan
(26 kilometers, or 16 miles across).
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 8 degrees above
the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera
Dec. 22, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million
kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Pan. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel
on Pan.
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 .