PIA06635: Straight Across the Rings
 Target Name:  Atlas
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle
 Product Size:  682 x 329 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA06635.tif (224.8 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA06635.jpg (8.426 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:

The small ring moon Atlas is seen here, on the far side of Saturn's immense ring system. Cassini was only 0.6 degrees above the ring plane when this image was taken. Atlas is 32 kilometers (20 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 11, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (957,000 miles) from Atlas and at a Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 9 kilometers (6 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2005-04-26