With Ghostly Spokes

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Caption:

Saturn's moon Pandora shares the stage with ghostly B ring spokes in this Cassini spacecraft scene.

Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) is on the left. The spokes are the radial markings visible on the right of the image. See PIA11144 and PIA08288 to learn more.

The image was taken using a compression scheme that reduces the image file size on the spacecraft's data recorder, resulting in the rings' slightly pixelated appearance. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 9 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 11, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 630,000 kilometers (391,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees. Image scale is 34 kilometers (21 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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