Flying By Pandora
PIA Number | PIA12690 |
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The Cassini spacecraft captured this close view of Saturn's moon Pandora during the spacecraft's flyby on June 3, 2010.
Pandora is 81 kilometers (50 miles) across, and orbits beyond Saturn's thin F ring, which is shepherded by Pandora and Prometheus. See Pandora's Color Close-up for an earlier, closer view of Pandora.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side Pandora. North on Pandora is up and rotated 20 degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 101,000 kilometers (63,000 miles) from Pandora and at a sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is 603 meters (1,980 feet) 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