As Cassini sped around Saturn, the spacecraft turned to snap this image of
bright spokes giving chase around the B ring.
These radial markings are appearing more often as Saturn approaches
equinox in August 2009 (see PIA11144).
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 31 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 2, 2009. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 578,000 kilometers (359,000 miles) from Saturn
and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 144 degrees. Image
scale is 30 kilometers (20 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.
