CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Many Mini-Jets

Many Mini-Jets
PIA 14632
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   Saturn's F ring shows several "mini-jets" near the upper-right of this image captured by Cassini. The A ring also appears in the lower-left of the image.

The mini-jets are thought by scientists to be caused by low-speed collisions in the core of the F ring ejecting dusty material from the core. For more on the mini-jets, see PIA15504.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 14, 2012.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 538,000 miles (867,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 10 degrees. Image scale is 3 miles (5 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini Solstice 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 Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Released: October 22, 2012 (PIA 14632)
Image/Caption Information


Alliance Member Comments
NeKto (Oct 25, 2012 at 8:17 AM):
the more detail you see, the more questions there are to ask. for me that means more fun to be had!
it almost looks like a gust of wind hit the F ring.