The serene beauty of Saturn invites the Cassini spacecraft's gaze as the
spacecraft hurtles through this dynamic system, studying the giant
planet's rings, moons, atmosphere, and magnetosphere.
The icy moon Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) is on the
planet's near side, about 180,000 kilometers (112,000 miles) closer to
Cassini than Saturn, in this scene.
The view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from less than a degree
below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral
filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were
obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 22, 2007 at
a distance of approximately 927,000 kilometers (576,000 miles) from
Saturn. Image scale is 56 kilometers (35 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
