Atlas is seen in this image with several background stars as the moon
orbits within the Roche Division— the region between Saturn's A and
F rings.
Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across) is in the top left quadrant of
the image. For higher-resolution images of this saucer shaped moon, see
PIA08405.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 65 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 23, 2009. The view was acquired at
a distance of approximately 913,000 kilometers (567,000 miles) from Saturn
and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 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.