This mosaic of Saturn's rings was acquired by Cassini's visual and
infrared mapping spectrometer instrument on Sept. 15, 2006, while the
spacecraft was in the shadow of the planet looking back towards the rings
from a distance of 2.16 million kilometers (1.34 million miles).
Data at wavelengths of 1.0 micron, 1.75 micron and 3.6 microns were
combined in the blue, green and red channels to make the pseudo-color
image shown here.
The brightest feature in the mosaic is the F ring, located at the outer
edge of the main rings. The F ring is overexposed and appears white in
this image. Of the main A, B and C rings; the C ring is the most prominent
and reddish in color, becoming saturated close to the sun. The more opaque
A and B rings are muddy in color and very dark in this geometry.
By contrast, the normally faint D ring, located just interior to the C
ring, is quite bright and blue, indicating the presence of very small ring
particles. Similarly, a narrow, green ringlet in the Cassini Division, as
well as the greenish G ring and blue E ring -- located at increasing
distances outside the F ring -- are predominantly composed of small
particles. The faint reddish band immediately outside the F ring is likely
to be an artifact caused by the extremely bright F ring.
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
visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team is based at the University
of Arizona where this image was produced.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm The visual and infrared mapping
spectrometer team homepage is at http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu.
