Day breaks on the northern hemisphere of Saturn in this image from the
Cassini spacecraft. The D ring is hidden below the horizon, but, working
outward from the planet, this image shows the C, B, A and F rings. The
moon Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) is a faint speck
inside the thin F ring in the upper left of the image.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 39
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 20, 2009 using a spectral filter
sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 853
nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 888,000
kilometers (552,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 121 degrees. Image scale is 50 kilometers (31 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.