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PIA12512: Eyeing the E Ring
NASA's Cassini spacecraft takes a look at Saturn's diffuse E ring which is formed from icy material spewing out of the south pole of the moon Enceladus. The E ring is seen nearly edge-on from slightly above the northern side of Saturn's ring plane.
 Target Name:  S Rings
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens 
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Wide Angle 
 Product Size:  955 x 650 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA12512.tif (621.6 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA12512.jpg (33.5 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 Cassini spacecraft takes a look at Saturn's diffuse E ring which is formed from icy material spewing out of the south pole of the moon Enceladus.

See PIA08921 to learn more about how Enceladus creates the E ring. The E ring is seen nearly edge-on from slightly above the northern side of Saturn's ring plane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 23, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 149 kilometers (92 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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2009-12-24