A-ring Propeller

A propeller-shaped structure, created by an unseen moon, can be seen in Saturn's A ring.

The propeller, which looks like a small, dark line interrupting the bright surrounding ring material, is in the upper left of this image near the edge of the Keeler Gap. See Sunlit Propeller to learn more about propellers.

This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 16 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 279,000 kilometers (173,000 miles) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 16 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (3,300 feet) 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