For the first time, the Cassini spacecraft captures the shadow of Saturn's
tiny moon Pandora sneaking onto the planet's main rings.
Only a portion of the shadow of Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across)
has crept onto the A ring here, but the shadow is long enough to stretch
across the Keeler Gap. The moon is not shown. 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 sunlit side of the rings from about 48 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 9, 2009. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 912,000 kilometers (567,000 miles) from Saturn
and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. Image scale
is 5 kilometers (3 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.