Three of Saturn's satellites are visible in this snapshot from the Cassini
spacecraft.
Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is in the top left of the
image. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) is just outside the F
ring.And, Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across) is the small moon that
has cut a path inside the rings below the center of the image.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 27
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 7, 2008 using clear filters:
CL1 (635 nm) and CL2 (635 nm). The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 1.031 million kilometers (641,000 miles) from Pan and at a
Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees. Image scale is 62
kilometers (38 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.