Faint Spokes on a Ring

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Caption:

This high-phase image from the Cassini spacecraft shows dark areas separating faint spokes that are brighter than the rest of Saturn's B ring.

At a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 122 degrees, light is scattered from the dusty spokes toward Cassini's cameras. See PIA10567 to learn more about spokes. The shadow of Saturn cuts across the bottom of the image. Several background stars are visible.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 39 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 24, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 887,000 kilometers (551,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 50 kilometers (31 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 .

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