Across the darkened expanse of Saturn's rings, the Cassini spacecraft
spies one of the F-ring shepherd moons.
Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) orbits Saturn just beyond the
outer edges of the F ring. Close to the planet, the image of the rings is
slightly distorted by Saturn's upper atmosphere.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 8
degrees above the ringplane. At lower right, ring shadows are cast upon
the planet.
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.
