PIA20500: Hidden Wonders


Hidden Wonders

Caption:

NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward the brilliant disk of Saturn, surrounded by the icy lanes of its rings. Faint wisps of cloud are visible in the atmosphere. At bottom, ring shadows trace delicate, curving lines across the planet.

Prometheus (53 miles or 86 kilometers across) is just a few pixels wide in this view, barely visible as a dark speck in front of the planet, below the rings and to the left of center.

Between April and September 2017, Cassini will plunge repeatedly through the gap that separates the planet from the rings.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about a degree above the ring plane. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 21, 2016.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 529,000 miles (852,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. Image scale is 30 miles (50 kilometers) per pixel.

Background Info:

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn Rings Prometheus, Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Ring Planet, Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Wide Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Atmosphere, Grayscale, Shadow, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2016-09-26
Date in Caption 2016-07-21
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA20500
Identifier PIA20500