Structure in the tenuous F ring can be seen in this image of the ring's
bright core.
Much of the structure in the F ring is created by its two shepherding
moons: Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) and Pandora (81
kilometers, or 50 miles across).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 8, 2008. The view, which looks down from about
70 degrees above the ringplane toward the unilluminated side of the rings,
was acquired at a distance of approximately 613,000 kilometers (381,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 77
degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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.
