CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Straight Across the Rings

Straight Across the Rings
PIA 06635
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   The small ring moon Atlas (30 kilometers, 19 miles across) is seen here, on the far side of Saturn's immense ring system. Cassini was only 0.6 degrees above the ring plane when this image was taken.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on March 11, 2005 from a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (957,000 miles) from Atlas and at a Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 9 kilometers (6 miles) 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: April 26, 2005 (PIA 06635)
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