Pandora Occults the F Ring

Saturn's moon Pandora glides in front of the narrow F ring, making the moon's oblong outline visible. The image also shows the A ring, Cassini Division, B ring, and part of the C ring. This view is from beneath the ring plane. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 23, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 97 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 9 kilometers (6 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