Portrait of Bright Spokes

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Caption:

The moons Mimas and Pandora join bright B ring spokes in this Cassini captured scene.

Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits just outside the thin F ring. Larger Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) can be seen on the left. To learn more about spokes, see PIA11144 .

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 12 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 30, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 80 degrees. Image scale is 106 kilometers (66 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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