Many Mini-Jets

Saturn's F ring shows several "mini-jets" near the upper-right of this image captured by the Cassini spacecraft. The A ring also appears in the lower-left of the image.

The mini-jets are thought by scientists to be caused by low-speed collisions in the core of the F ring ejecting dusty material from the core. For more on the mini-jets, see Exotic Trails or Mini-Jets.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 14, 2012.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 538,000 miles (867,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 10 degrees. Image scale is 3 miles (5 kilometers) 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-Caltech/Space Science Institute