The serene beauty of Saturn invites Cassini's gaze as the spacecraft hurtles through this dynamic system, studying the giant planet's rings, moons and atmosphere.
The icy moon Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across) is on the planet's near side, about 180,000 kilometers (112,000 miles) closer to Cassini than Saturn, in this scene.
The view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from less than a degree below the ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 22, 2007 at a distance of approximately 927,000 kilometers (576,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 56 kilometers (35 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: October 24, 2008 (PIA 10497)
Image/Caption Information |
|
PIA 10497
Avg Rating: 8.92/10
Full Size 1013x1018:
JPEG 261 KB
PNG 537 KB
TIFF 3.1 MB
|
