PIA07559: Luminescent Rings


Luminescent Rings

Caption:

This view shows the unlit face of Saturn's rings, visible via scattered and transmitted light. In these views, dark regions represent gaps and areas of higher particle densities, while brighter regions are filled with less dense concentrations of ring particles.

The dim right side of the image contains nearly the entire C ring. The brighter region in the middle is the inner B ring, while the darkest part represents the dense outer B Ring. The Cassini Division and the innermost part of the A ring are at the upper-left.

Saturn's shadow carves a dark triangle out of the lower right corner of this image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 8, 2005, at a distance of approximately 433,000 kilometers (269,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 22 kilometers (14 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 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 .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn Rings C Ring, Cassini Division, Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Ring Gap, Planet
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Wide Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Shadow, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2005-08-08
Date in Caption 2005-06-08
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07559
Identifier PIA07559