The Encke Gap, the broad, vertical dark band running down the center of
this image, is maintained by the small moon Pan (not pictured). Pan also
shepherds three ringlets, all of which appear here as faint, narrow bands
within the Encke Gap.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 19, 2008 at a distance of approximately
271,000 kilometers (168,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 138 degrees. Image scale is
about 1 kilometer 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.