Hiding within the Encke gap is the small moon Pan, partly in shadow and
party cut off by the outer A ring in this view. Similar to Atlas, Pan
appears to have a slight ridge around its middle; and like Atlas, Pan's
orbit also coincides with a faint ringlet.
(See PIA08320 for a movie featuring Pan).
Pan is 26 kilometers (16 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 30, 2006 at a distance of approximately
269,000 kilometers (167,000 miles) from Pan. Image scale is 2 kilometers
(5,259 feet) 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.