Click on the partial image for full view of annotated version
A scan across Saturn's incredible halo of ice rings yields a study in
precision and order.
This natural color mosaic was acquired by the Cassini spacecraft as it
soared 39 degrees above the unilluminated side of the rings.
Major named gaps are labeled at the top. The main rings themselves, along
with the F ring, are labeled at the bottom, along with their inner and
outer boundaries.
This mosaic was constructed from narrow-angle camera images taken
immediately after the wide-angle camera mosaic PIA08388. Radial
features can be seen in the rings that are about ten times smaller than in
the wide-angle view. This scan is rotated 180 degrees compared to PIA08388
in order to present the rings with distance from Saturn increasing left to
right.
The view combines 45 images -- 15 separate sets of red, green and blue
images -- taken over the course of about 2.5 hours, as Cassini scanned
across the rings.
The images in this view were obtained on May 9, 2007, at a distance of
approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn. Image
scale in the radial (horizontal) direction is about 6 kilometers (4 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.
