CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Not-Quite-Empty Gap

Not-Quite-Empty Gap
PIA 10554
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   The Encke Gap, the broad, vertical dark band running down the center of this image, is maintained by the small moon Pan (not pictured). Pan also shepherds three ringlets, all of which appear here as faint, narrow bands within the Encke Gap.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 19, 2008 at a distance of approximately 271,000 kilometers (168,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 138 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (4,189 feet) 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: January 12, 2009 (PIA 10554)
Image/Caption Information