Held in gravity's embrace, Saturn's darkened, icy rings encircle the
clouded gas giant.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 29
degrees above the ringplane. The rings are made visible on this side
(their "dark" side) by sunlight that scatters though them and by occulting
the planet and background stars.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on March 29, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.9
million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 113
kilometers (70 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.