A bright arc within Saturn's faint G ring holds a tiny gift.
A small moonlet is just visible as a short streak near the ansa of the G
ring arc in the top of two versions of the same image. The second (bottom)
version of the image has been brightened to enhance the visibility of the
G ring. The other streaks in this version of the image are stars smeared
by the camera's long exposure time of 26 seconds. This version of the
image shows a gap in the G ring which was faintly visible in an earlier
Cassini movie (see PIA08327).
The moonlet, dubbed S/2008 S 1, is likely a major source of the material
of the G ring (see PIA11148).
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 1 degrees
below the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 28, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27
degrees. Image scale is 7 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.