This Cassini spacecraft view of Pan in the Encke gap shows hints of detail
on the moon's dark side, which is lit by saturnshine -- sunlight reflected
off Saturn.
Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) cruises the Encke gap (325
kilometers, or 200 miles wide) with several faint ringlets.
This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 52 degrees
below the ringplane. The sunlit portion of Pan is partly overexposed.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 27, 2006 at a distance of approximately
385,000 kilometers (239,000 miles) from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 86 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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.
