Eyeing the E Ring

The Cassini spacecraft takes a look at Saturn's diffuse E ring which is formed from icy material spewing out of the south pole of the moon Enceladus.

See Casting a Shadow to learn more about how Enceladus creates the E ring. The E ring is seen nearly edge-on from slightly above the northern side of Saturn's ring plane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 23, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 149 kilometers (92 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