This Cassini spacecraft view shows details of Saturn's outer A ring,
including the Encke and Keeler gaps. The A ring brightens substantially
outside the Keeler Gap.
On both sides of the broad Encke gap are bright spiral density waves. See
PIA08824 for comparison.
This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 52 degrees
below the ringplane.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using
a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at
930 nanometers. The view was acquired on Feb. 19, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 950,000 kilometers (590,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.