The Cassini spacecraft continues to profile the haze structure and opacity
in Saturn's upper atmosphere with images like this, which captures Rigel,
a star in Orion whose brightness is well-known, as it passes behind the
planet.
The extent to which the star's light is dimmed tells scientists about the
sizes and amounts of the molecules and tiny particles that make up the
atmospheric hazes.
The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 30, 2004 at a distance of approximately
446,000 kilometers (277,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 3
kilometers (2 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.