In the lower center of this image, the Cassini spacecraft captures an
intriguing feature of Saturn's tenuous F ring.
To learn more about this ring, see PIA07717 and PIA08397.
Several background stars are visible in this image. This view looks toward
the sunlit side of the rings from about 64 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 obtained at a distance
of approximately 905,000 kilometers (562,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 107 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.