Depth Sounding

Cassini looks toward northern latitudes on Saturn and out across the ringplane. This infrared view probes clouds beneath the hazes that obscure the planet's depths in natural color views.

This image looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 24 degrees above the ringplane. The rings' shadow drapes across the region north of the planet's bright equatorial band.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of light centered at 890 nanometers. The view was acquired on May 24, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 89 kilometers (55 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