Annotated Version
Click on the image for full view
Details of Saturn's icy rings are visible in this sweeping view from
Cassini of the planet's glorious ring system.
This natural color mosaic, taken from 10 degrees below the illuminated
side of the rings, shows, from left to right, radially outward from
Saturn, the C ring (with its Colombo and Maxwell gaps); the B ring and the
Cassini division beyond, with the intervening Huygens gap; the A ring
(with its Encke and Keeler gaps); and, on the far right, the narrow F
ring. The total span covers approximately 65,700 kilometers (40,800 miles).
Although it is too faint to be seen here, the D ring is located just to
the left of the C ring.
It is interesting to compare this view with PIA08389, which shows the
unilluminated side of the rings. The difference in brightness of the B
ring relative to the other rings is striking. When illuminated directly by
the sun, the B ring appears brighter than the adjacent A and C rings;
however, when viewing the unlit side of the B ring, the A and C rings
appear brighter. This phenomenon occurs because the density of the B ring
is greater than that of the A or C rings.
The mosaic was constructed from 45 narrow-angle-camera images—15
separate sets of red, green and blue images—taken over the course of
about four hours, as Cassini scanned across the rings.
The images in this view were obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Nov.
26, 2008, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000
miles) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28
degrees. Image scale in the radial (horizontal) direction is about 7
kilometers (4.3 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.
