The sunlit face of Saturn's rings shows magnificent detail in this image
taken in near infrared light. Most notable is the transition in brightness
toward the outer edges of the image, due to differences in composition and
ring particle density. The image was obtained from Cassini's vantage point
beneath the ring plane.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
Dec. 12, 2004, at a distance of 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles)
from Saturn, through a broadband filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 862 nanometers. The image scale is about 11
kilometers (7 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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
