Plying a Division

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Caption:

Saturn's moon Atlas, shown at the center of this image, orbits within the Roche Division separating the A ring from the tenuous F ring.

To learn more about the small moon Atlas (30 kilometers, 19 miles across), see PIA08233 .

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 51 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 2, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Atlas and at a Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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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