The shepherd moon, Pandora, is seen here alongside the narrow F ring that
it helps maintain. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.
Cassini obtained this view from about four degrees above the ringplane.
Captured here are several faint, dusty ringlets in the vicinity of the F
ring core. The ringlets do not appear to be perturbed to the degree seen
in the core.
The appearance of Pandora here is exciting, as the moon's complete shape
can be seen, thanks to reflected light from Saturn, which illuminates
Pandora's dark side. The hint of a crater is visible on the dark side of
the moon.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 4, 2005, at a distance of approximately
967,000 kilometers (601,000 miles) from Pandora and at a
Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 117 degrees. The image scale
is 6 kilometers (4 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
