The ghostly features in Saturn's B ring called spokes are making an
appearance again as the Cassini spacecraft continues its tour of the
Saturn system.
These dusty features on the rings are often wedge-shaped, as this one is,
with the inner portions of the spoke being wider than the outer portions
due to electromagnetic effects on the dust particles.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Nov. 26, 2008 at a distance of approximately 922,000
kilometers (573,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 39 degrees. Image scale is 52 kilometers (32 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.