This contrast-enhanced view shows a faint spoke in Saturn's B ring. These
ghostly radial structures were imaged by the Voyager spacecraft in the
1980s. Using the Cassini spacecraft data, scientists are hoping to piece
together an understanding of how these mysterious features form.
The Sun-ring-spacecraft viewing angle makes quite a difference in the
spokes' appearance: they appear bright against the rings when seen at
high phase angles and darker than the rings at lower phase angles. This
view was acquired at a phase angle of 133 degrees.
The scene looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 6 degrees
below the ringplane.
A train of clumplike structures curls around the F ring at left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 24, 2006 at a distance of approximately 999,000 kilometers (621,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 56 kilometers (35 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.
