PIA08359: Pastel Planet


Pastel Planet

Caption:

With pastel blues, pinks, greens and golds, Saturn displays a dazzling diversity of colors and hues.

Here, Cassini looks upward at, and through, the sunlit side of the rings from about 19 degrees below the ring plane. The small moon Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) can be spotted off the planet's western limb (edge) near the image bottom.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural-color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 3, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 60 kilometers (38 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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn Janus
System Saturn
Target Type Planet Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Wide Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Color, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2007-03-01
Date in Caption 2007-02-03
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08359
Identifier PIA08359