Mysterious B Ring

This detailed view of Saturn's mid-B ring shows intriguing structure, the cause of which has yet to be explained by ring scientists. The image shows a radial location located between approximately 107,200 to 115,700 kilometers (66,600 to 71,900 miles) from Saturn.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 3, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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