This movie shows the bright G ring arc flashing around the inner edge of Saturn’s G ring, a tenuous ring outside the main ring system. The arc is the same feature identified in images of the G ring taken in May 2005 (see PIA07718). Scientists have seen the arc a handful of times over the past year, and it always appears to be a few times brighter than the rest of the ring and very tightly confined to a narrow strip along the inside edge of the G ring. Imaging team members believe that this feature is long-lived and may be held together by resonant interactions with the satellite Mimas of the type that corral the famed ring arcs around Neptune. The movie consists of 15 frames acquired every half hour over a period of seven-and-a-half hours. The version in the lower panel is vertically stretched by a factor of five. The clear filter images in this movie sequence were acquired by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 25, 2006 at a distance of 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale on the sky at the distance of Saturn is about 24 kilometers (15 miles) per pixel.

PIA 07805 Avg Rating: 8.55/10

Full Size 512x360: GIF 927 KB Quicktime 665 KB MPEG 1.3 MB