B Ring Irregularities

The spoke-forming region in the outer part of Saturn's B ring is often seen to exhibit the irregular, patchy appearance around the ring that is visible in this Cassini view.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 5 degrees above the ringplane. The Cassini Division is visible at lower left.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 21, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 68 degrees. Image scale is about 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel in the radial, or outward from Saturn, direction.

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