Broad, dark spokes in the B ring are clearly seen in this image of
Saturn's rings.
The spokes are finally becoming quite common, as they were during the
Voyager flybys. These observations and others like it seem to support the
idea that the spokes become most prominent near equinox.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Oct. 19, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.011
million kilometers (628,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Image scale is 57
kilometers (35 miles) per pixel.
Also visible in this image is the moon Janus off beyond the rings.
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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
