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PIA12259: Infrared Ring around Saturn
This picture highlights a slice of Saturn's largest ring. The ring (red band) was discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which detected infrared light, or heat, from the dusty ring material.
 Mission:  Hubble Space Telescope 
Spitzer Space Telescope 
 Instrument:  IRAC 
 Product Size:  387 x 727 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  California Institute of Technology 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA12259.tif (845.1 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA12259.jpg (50.56 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Click here for larger version of figure 1 for PIA12259
Figure 1
Click on the image for larger version

This picture highlights a slice of Saturn's largest ring. The ring (red band in Figure 1) was discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which detected infrared light, or heat, from the dusty ring material. Spitzer viewed the ring edge-on from its Earth-trailing orbit around the sun.

The ring has a diameter equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. And it's thick too -- about 20 Saturns could fit into its vertical height. The ring is tilted about 27 degrees from Saturn's main ring plane.

The Spitzer data were taken by its multiband imaging photometer and show infrared light with a wavelength of 24 microns.

The picture of Saturn was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Image Credit:
Spitzer image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Virginia
Hubble image credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA

Image Addition Date:
2009-10-07