CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Bright Arc of Ice

Bright Arc of Ice
PIA 07655
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   The searing arc of light seen here is Saturn's icy F ring, seen nearly edge-on. In the background, Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) is lit by reflected light from Saturn and the rings, with only the slightest sliver of light at its bottom being from direct sunlight.

The faint material surrounding the F ring likely lies in the planet's equatorial plane, extending radially farther out and in from the main F ring core. A smaller fraction of this material could be vertically extended, and Cassini's investigations should help to clarify this.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 30, 2005, at a distance of approximately 689,000 kilometers (428,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is approximately 4 kilometers (2 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: December 19, 2005 (PIA 07655)
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