The Encke Gap moon, Pan, has left its mark on a scalloped ringlet of the
Encke Gap. The moon creates these perturbations as it sweeps through the
325-kilometer (200-mile) gap in the A ring.
Three diffuse ringlets reside in the Encke Gap: the bright one on the left
of the gap, a faint one in the middle and a very faint one on the right
side of the gap where the A ring begins again.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 17
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in green light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 10, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (680,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28
degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (about 4 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.
