The shadow of the moon Mimas has just slipped off Saturn's rings and onto
the planet in this Cassini spacecraft image.
The shadow is visible as a short dash below the rings' shadows on the
planet. At this exposure setting, the rings are too dim to be seen easily.
As Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox, the planet's moons cast
shadows onto the rings. To learn more about this special time and to see a
movie of a moon's shadow moving across the rings, see PIA11651.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 61
degrees above the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue
spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The
images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on
April 30, 2009 at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers
(870,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 80 kilometers (50 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.