CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Peering Through the Plane

Peering Through the Plane
PIA 09820
Avg Rating: 8.94/10

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   Looking down through the A ring and Cassini Division, Cassini sees the bright limb of Saturn. The view shows a portion the rings from the outer B ring, at upper right, to the F ring at bottom.

See PIA08389 for a labeled map of Saturn's rings.

The perspective is toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 15 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 12, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 28 kilometers (17 miles) per pixel in the radial, or outward from Saturn, direction; and 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel in the longitudinal, or around Saturn, direction.

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: January 22, 2008 (PIA 09820)
Image/Caption Information


Alliance Member Comments
Red_dragon (Jan 22, 2008 at 6:38 AM):
Really beautiful. Compare it with "A-Ring Odyssey" (http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=3246) and with "Diagnostic Darkness" (http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=1342)