This November 2008 Cassini snapshot showcases a classic view of the
triangular shape typical of many of the spokes in Saturn's outer B ring.
Small particles in the ring compose the spokes and these wedge-shaped
patterns seem to be appearing more often as Saturn approaches equinox.
The moons Pan, Pandora and Janus are also visible. Janus (179 kilometers,
or 111 miles across) is farthest outside the rings. Pandora (81
kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits outside the faint F ring. Pan (28
kilometers, or 17 miles across) is near the top right of the image and can
be seen as a faint sphere cutting a path in the thin black strip of the
Encke Gap in the A ring.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 12 degrees
below the ringplane.The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 10, 2008 at a distance of
approximately 1.029 million kilometers (639,000 miles) from Saturn and at
a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Image scale is 58
kilometers (36 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.
