CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Ring Study Subjects

Cassini turns its gaze toward the outer A ring to find Pan (28 kilometers, 17 miles across) coasting behind one of the thin ringlets with which it shares the Encke gap.

Understanding the influence of Saturn's moons on its immense ring system is one of the goals of the Cassini mission. The study of the icy rings includes the delicate and smokey-looking F ring, seen here toward upper right. The F ring exhibits visibly bright kinks and multiple strands here.

Arching across the center of the scene, the outermost section of the A ring is notably brighter than the ring material interior to it.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on Aug. 13, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Pan.

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: August 29, 2005 (PIA 07574)
Image/Caption Information 		  Ring Study Subjects
PIA 07574
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