CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Ring World

Ring World
PIA 08361
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   Our robotic emissary, flying high above Saturn, captured this view of an alien copper-colored ring world. The overexposed planet has deliberately been removed to show the unlit rings alone, seen from an elevation 60 degrees, the highest Cassini has yet attained.

The view is a mosaic of 27 images -- i.e., nine separate sets of red, green and blue images -- taken over the course of about 45 minutes, as Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system.

The planet's shadow carves a dark swath across the ringplane at right. The overexposed planet has been removed.

Moons visible in this image: Epimetheus (113 kilometers, 70 miles across) at the 1 o'clock position, Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across) at the 5 o'clock position, Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) at the 10 o'clock position.

Bright clumps of material in the narrow F ring moved in their orbits between each of the color exposures, creating a chromatic misalignment that provides some sense of the continuous motion in the ring system.

Radially extending lens flare artifacts, which result from light being scattered within the camera optics, are present in the view.

The images in this natural color view were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 21, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 90 kilometers (56 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: March 1, 2007 (PIA 08361)
Image/Caption Information


Alliance Member Comments
Moonsister (Mar 15, 2007 at 2:13 AM):
I had the same reaction as DEChengst, this looks like spagettification, with Saturn already sucked to ??? I wanna go! Can you say 'Starchild'?
DEChengst (Mar 7, 2007 at 12:51 PM):
Wow! Saturn has just been sucked into a black hole :p
moonbird (Mar 1, 2007 at 11:56 PM):
Although every school boy is taught that light travels in a straight line -- the demonstration of that fact on this huge and grand scale is breathtaking. Bravo!!