Collapsed Rings

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Caption:

A lone moon coasts along in this view, which was taken from less than a degree below Saturn's sunlit ringplane. The rings are squashed into a narrow band from this viewing angle, foreshortening all of their radial features.

Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) travels from left to right here, led by its large crater Herschel.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 26, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (661,000 miles) from Mimas. 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 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 .

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