Shadow in the Cassini Division

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Caption:

The shadow of the moon Mimas is seen through the unlit side of the Cassini Division of Saturn's rings.

As Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox, the planet's moons cast shadows onto the rings. To learn more about this special time and to see a movie of a moon's shadow moving across the rings, see PIA11651 .

To watch a movie of Mimas' shadow moving across the unlit side of the rings, see PIA11660 .

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 53 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 1, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 94 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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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