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PIA09807: Spotting the Shepherd
Across the darkened expanse of Saturn's rings, NASA's Cassini spacecraft spied one of the F-ring shepherd moons, Pandora, in 2008.
 Target Name:  Pandora
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens 
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle 
 Product Size:  1016 x 816 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team 
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA09807.tif (830.1 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA09807.jpg (31.24 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:

Across the darkened expanse of Saturn's rings, the Cassini spacecraft spies one of the F-ring shepherd moons.

Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) orbits Saturn just beyond the outer edges of the F ring. Close to the planet, the image of the rings is slightly distorted by Saturn's upper atmosphere.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 8 degrees above the ringplane. At lower right, ring shadows are cast upon the planet.

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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2008-01-03