PIA11524: Navigating the Blackness


Navigating the Blackness

Caption:

Saturn's moon Atlas plies the Roche Division between the A ring and the thin F ring.

Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across) is near the center of the image. Bright specks in the image are background stars.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 61 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 30, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Atlas and at a Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 74 degrees. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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 Atlas A Ring, Saturn Rings
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Ring
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2009-06-29
Date in Caption 2009-04-30
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11524
Identifier PIA11524