CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Dual-Illuminated Pandora

Dual-Illuminated Pandora
PIA 12732
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   Cassini watches Pandora, one of the F ring's two shepherding moons, orbiting beyond the thin ring.

The small moon can be seen on the left of this image. Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across) is brightly lit on the left by sunlight on the moon's anti-Saturn side and dimly illuminated on the right by light reflected off Saturn on the moon's Saturn-facing side.

See PIA11589 to learn more about how Pandora and another moon, Prometheus, shape the F ring.

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane. Seven background stars are visible.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 1, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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: September 30, 2010 (PIA 12732)
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