The Cassini spacecraft captures Saturn's main rings in a study of light
and dark.
A bright knot is visible in the F ring near upper left. Ring scientists
think features like this can be created when a small moonlet collides with
the ring's core, leading to collisions that scatter fine, icy particles
(see PIA08290).
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 16
degrees above the ringplane. The edge of Saturn's shadow forms a dark
wedge on the rings at right.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Sept. 22, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (743,000 miles) from Saturn and at
a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27 degrees. Image scale is 68
kilometers (42 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.
