PIA06618: Pandora at the Edge


Pandora at the Edge

Caption:

Pandora is seen in this dramatic view, orbiting just beyond the outer edge of Saturn's F ring. Several bright areas are visible within the F ring. In the main rings, the Keeler gap and the Encke gap, with a bright ringlet, are also visible. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 108 degrees. The image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

Background Info:

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Pandora Encke Gap, F Ring, Saturn Rings
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Gap, Ring
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2005-04-01
Date in Caption 2005-02-18
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06618
Identifier PIA06618