F Ring Knot

The Cassini spacecraft captures an intriguing feature in the perturbed core of Saturn's F ring.

The feature is similar in appearance to the one captured in F Ring Dynamism.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 32 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 31, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale is 10 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 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