This wide and sweeping view of the sunlit rings of Saturn takes in the
impressive variety in their structure -- from the clumpy and perennially
intriguing F ring to the many waves, ringlets and gaps in the A and B
rings and the Cassini Division in between.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2006 at a distance of approximately 640,000
kilometers (397,000 miles) from Saturn. The view was acquired from about
10 degrees below the ringplane. Image scale on the sky at the distance of
Saturn is 35 kilometers (22 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.