Diagonal Division

Fine, sharp-edged details and smooth gradients in the ring features of the Cassini Division are imaged here together at excellent resolution.

The faint ringlet in the dark gap left of center is a recently discovered feature, found in Cassini images (see A Faint Ring Shines).

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 21 degrees below the ringplane. The scene takes in the entire Cassini Division (4,800 kilometers, or 2,980 miles wide), as well as the innermost region of the A ring at extreme left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2007 at a distance of approximately 476,000 kilometers (296,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 2 kilometers (2 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