The short and slender shadow of Pan is cast over Saturn's A ring as the
moon orbits within the Encke Gap.
As Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox, the planet's moons are
casting 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.
The shadow of the small moon Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across) is
much smaller than those cast by larger moons, such as Tethys (see PIA11483).
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 16 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 10, 2009. The view was acquired at
a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Pan
and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 44 degrees. Image scale is
6 kilometers (4 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.