PIA17128: Marvelous Mini-Jet
 Target Name:  S Rings
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle
 Product Size:  1016 x 1016 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA17128.tif (1.033 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA17128.jpg (31.68 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:

A beautiful "mini-jet" appears in the dynamic F ring of Saturn. Saturn's A ring (including the Keeler gap and just a hint of the Encke gap at the upper-right) also appears.

The mini-jets are thought by imaging scientists to be caused by low-speed collisions in the F ring ejecting dusty material from the ring's core. For more on the mini-jets, see PIA15504.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 48 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 20, 2013.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 841,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 82 degrees. Image scale is 5 miles (8 kilometers) 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 and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2013-09-16