A section of Saturn's perturbed F ring displays kinks in its bright,
double-stranded core. At left, edge waves in the Encke Gap, caused by the
presence of Pan, can be seen, along with two faint ringlets.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 4
degrees above the ringplane. The rings disappear into the planet's shadow
at the top of the scene.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Nov. 14, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn
and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 55 degrees.
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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
