CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Across the Dark Ringplane

Across the Dark Ringplane
PIA 08997
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   Cassini skims past Saturn's ringplane at a low angle, spotting two ring moons on the far side.

Pan (28 kilometers, 17 miles across) sits within the Encke Gap right of center. Beyond the F ring hovers Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across).

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 14, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 10 kilometers (6 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: August 2, 2007 (PIA 08997)
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