Peering Through the Plane

Looking down through the A ring and Cassini Division, the Cassini spacecraft sees the bright limb of Saturn. The view shows a portion the rings from the outer B ring, at upper right, to the F ring at bottom.

See Expanse of Ice for a labeled map of Saturn's rings.

The perspective is toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 15 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 12, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 28 kilometers (17 miles) per pixel in the radial, or outward from Saturn, direction; and 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel in the longitudinal, or around Saturn, direction.

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