CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
God of Shepherds and Flocks

God of Shepherds and Flocks
PIA 10574
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   The Encke gap moon, Pan, has left his mark on a scalloped ringlet of the Encke Gap. The moon creates these perturbations as it sweeps through the 325-kilometer (200-mile) gap in the A ring.

Three diffuse ringlets reside in the Encke gap: the bright one on the left of the gap, a faint one in the middle and a very faint one on the right side of the gap where the A ring begins again.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 17 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 10, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (712,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. 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 Equinox Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: February 9, 2009 (PIA 10574)
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