PIA10423: Spokes on the Wheel


Spokes on the Wheel

Caption:

As they wheel about the planet, Saturn's sunlit rings often exhibit dark, radial markings called spokes.

Spokes are seen only in the broad B ring, and can also appear bright in certain viewing geometries (see PIA08302 ).

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 11 degrees below the ringplane.

Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) is a speck above the rings at left. The planet's shadow darkens the ringplane at lower right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 3, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (636,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 19 degrees. Image scale is 61 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/ . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn Rings B 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 Wide Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Shadow, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2008-07-11
Date in Caption 2008-06-03
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10423
Identifier PIA10423