In a Thin Ring

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Caption:

A bright clump of material within Saturn's tenuous F ring stands out near the center top of this Cassini spacecraft image.

See PIA12710 and PIA12785 to learn more about the F ring and its unusual "fan" features. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 1 degree below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 16, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 320,000 kilometers (199,000 miles) from the F ring. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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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