PIA07523: Pandora's Flocks


Pandora’s Flocks

Caption:

The shepherd moon, Pandora, is seen here alongside the narrow F ring that it helps maintain. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.

Cassini obtained this view from about four degrees above the ringplane. Captured here are several faint, dusty ringlets in the vicinity of the F ring core. The ringlets do not appear to be perturbed to the degree seen in the core.

The appearance of Pandora here is exciting, as the moon's complete shape can be seen, thanks to reflected light from Saturn, which illuminates Pandora's dark side. The hint of a crater is visible on the dark side of the moon.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 4, 2005, at a distance of approximately 967,000 kilometers (601,000 miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 117 degrees. The image scale is 6 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 . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn Rings F Ring, Pandora, Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Ring Planet, Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Dust, Grayscale, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2005-06-17
Date in Caption 2005-05-04
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07523
Identifier PIA07523