Spoke Embellishment

Bright spokes grace Saturn's B ring in this Cassini spacecraft snapshot that also features a couple of the planet's moons large and small.

Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across) can be seen in the upper left of the image. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) appears as a small speck beyond the thin F ring near the center left of the image. The spokes are particularly noticeable on the far right of the image. See Bright Spokes, Dark Shadow to learn more about spokes.

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 8 degrees above the ringplane. Pandora has been brightened by a factor of two relative to the rings and Dione to enhance visibility. Dione is overexposed here.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 30, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 104 degrees. Image scale is 111 kilometers (69 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