The faint G ring surrounding Saturn offers up a glimpse of its newfound
tiny moonlet.
The moonlet is near the center of this image. A long exposure of 46
seconds was required to capture the light from this tiny object and G
ring, so the moonlet and a few stars have been smeared by motion, the
stars showing up as short diagonal dashes. The moonlet has also been
smeared and appears to be a short vertical dash that is aligned with the
ring.
In August 2008 Cassini scientists spotted this moonlet, dubbed S/2008 S 1.
It orbits in an arc, or partial ring, within the G ring. Imaging team
scientists estimated the moonlet's diameter at about half a kilometer
(one-third mile). For earlier images of this moonlet, see PIA11148.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 14
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 20, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000
miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 7 kilometers (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.
