F Ring Informants

Ever-changing kinks and wiggles define Saturn's dynamic F ring. The evolution of F-ring features like those seen here are of interest to ring scientists because they reveal a great deal about the processes shaping the ring's structure.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 4 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 15, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (821,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 16 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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