Cassini's ability to remain sharply pointed at its targets allowed this
image of Saturn's faint, dusty G ring to be made. The thin streaks visible
here are star trails, which are created during long exposures, when the
spacecraft remains locked onto a target. The camera shutter was open for
three-and-a-half minutes during this particular exposure. A long exposure
was required to see details of this quite tenuous ring.
The feature inside the G ring, at upper right, is also a star trail.
The image was taken in polarized visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 7, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.2
million kilometers (750,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 10
kilometers (9 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. For additional images visit the
Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .
