The moons Mimas and Pandora join bright B ring spokes in this Cassini
captured scene.
Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits just outside the thin F
ring. Larger Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) can be seen on
the left. To learn more about spokes, see PIA11144.
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about
12 degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Aug. 30, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn and
at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 80 degrees. Image scale is
106 kilometers (66 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.