Cassini turns its gaze toward Saturn's outer A ring to find the moon Pan
coasting behind one of the thin ringlets with which it shares the Encke
Gap. Pan is 26 kilometers (16 miles) across.
Understanding the influence of Saturn's moons on its immense ring system
is one of the goals of the Cassini mission. The study of the icy rings
includes the delicate and smokey-looking F ring, seen here toward upper
right. The F ring exhibits visibly bright kinks and multiple strands here.
Arching across the center of the scene, the outermost section of the A
ring is notably brighter than the ring material interior to it.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 13, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.3
million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 14
kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Pan.
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.
