Fine, sharp-edged details and smooth gradients in the ring features of the
Cassini Division are imaged here together at excellent resolution.
The faint ringlet in the dark gap left of center is a recently discovered
feature, found in Cassini images (see PIA08937).
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 21 degrees
below the ringplane. The scene takes in the entire Cassini Division (4,800
kilometers, or 2,980 miles wide), as well as the innermost region of the A
ring at extreme left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2007 at a distance of approximately
476,000 kilometers (296,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 2
kilometers (2 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.