In a Thin Ring

Saturn's tenuous F ring
May 16, 2011
PIA NumberPIA12766
Language
  • english

A bright clump of material within Saturn's tenuous F ring stands out near the center top of this Cassini spacecraft image.

See 'Fan' Spread and F Ring's Bright Core Clumps to learn more about the F ring and its unusual "fan" features. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 1 degree below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 16, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 320,000 kilometers (199,000 miles) from the F ring. 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute