PIA14625: Pan In the Middle


Pan In the Middle

Caption:

Saturn's tiny moon Pan orbits in the middle of the Encke Gap of the planet's A ring in this image from the Cassini spacecraft.

Pan (17 miles, or 28 kilometers across) is visible as a bright dot in the gap near the center of this view. See PIA12604 to see Pan casting a long shadow around the time of Saturn's August 2009 equinox.

The wide Roche Division separates the A ring from the thin F ring in the lower left quarter of the view. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 20 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 25, 2012. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Pan. Image scale is 7 miles (12 kilometers) 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 Pan A Ring, Encke Gap, Saturn Rings
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Gap, Ring
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Shadow, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2012-09-10
Date in Caption 2012-06-25
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA14625
Identifier PIA14625