Distant Shepherd

Gazing across the plains of Saturn's icy rings, Cassini catches the F ring shepherd moon Pandora hovering in the distance.

See Pandora's Color Close-up for an up-close color view of Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 116 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Pandora. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute