Detailing the Division

The Cassini spacecraft looks between Saturn's A and B rings to spy structure in the Cassini Division.
PIA NumberPIA12735
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The Cassini spacecraft looks between Saturn's A and B rings to spy structure in the Cassini Division.

The Cassini Division, occupying the middle and left of the image, contains five dim bands of ring material, but not all of the division is shown in this image. The B ring is on the right of the image. The Huygens Gap is the widest black swath near the middle of the image. See A Full Sweep of Saturn's Rings, The Familiar Division and New Rings for Cassini's Division to learn more. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 3, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 443,000 kilometers (275,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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