Embedded in Saturn's A ring is saucer-shaped Pan. The moon is seen here
with two of the diffuse ringlets with which it shares the Encke Gap.
At the top of the scene, the inner edge of the broad gap displays both
edge waves and wakes caused by Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across).
The thin strands of the F ring are seen at lower right.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 11
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 12, 2008. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million
miles) from Pan. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
