Pan orbits in the Encke gap near the middle of this image.
Also visible is one of the three dusty ringlets that reside in the Encke
gap.
Near the top of the image, the F ring puts in an appearance as well.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Nov. 5, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.309
million kilometers (813,000 miles) from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 32 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per
pixel.
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.
