CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
With Ghostly Spokes

Saturn's moon Pandora shares the stage with ghostly B ring spokes in this Cassini scene.

Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across) is on the left. The spokes are the radial markings visible on the right of the image. See PIA11144 and PIA08288 to learn more.

The image was taken using a compression scheme that reduces the image file size on the spacecraft's data recorder, resulting in the rings' slightly pixelated appearance. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 9 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 11, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 630,000 kilometers (391,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees. Image scale is 34 kilometers (21 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 11, 2010 (PIA 12547)
Image/Caption Information 		  With Ghostly Spokes
PIA 12547
Avg Rating: 9.32/10

Full Size 750x684:
JPEG 62 KB
PNG 140 KB
TIFF 514 KB