CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Unidentified F Ring Objects

Unidentified F Ring Objects
PIA 07713
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   A solitary clump-like feature in Saturn's F ring orbits past in this movie sequence made from Cassini images. This feature is seen magnified at bottom right in PIA07716.

Scientists are trying to determine whether such features are solid moonlets that help control the ring or just loose clumps of particles within the ring.

The images in this sequence were acquired in visible light using the narrow angle camera on April 13, 2005 from a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 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 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: September 5, 2005 (PIA 07713)
Image/Caption Information