CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Small Moons on the Edge

Staring toward the outer edge of Saturn's main rings, Cassini spots Pandora and tiny Atlas. Several clumps are visible in the narrow F ring, as well as multiple dusty strands flanking the F ring core.

Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across) is seen here outside the F ring, while Atlas (30 kilometers, 19 miles across) is a mere dim pixel just above the bright outer edge of the A ring.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 19, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 862 nanometers, and at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 16 kilometers (10 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 30, 2006 (PIA 08145)
Image/Caption Information 		  Small Moons on the Edge
PIA 08145
Avg Rating: 10/10

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