Although Saturn's moon Pan is absent from this image of the A ring's Encke
Gap, the moon's handiwork is still displayed.
The two ringlets seen in the gap are maintained by the gravitational
action of Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across). To learn more about
this process, see PIA07528.
The point of light near the bottom of the image is a star.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 41
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 17, 2009. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115
degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.