Saturn in Recline

The serene beauty of Saturn invites the Cassini spacecraft's gaze as the spacecraft hurtles through this dynamic system, studying the giant planet's rings, moons, atmosphere, and magnetosphere.

The icy moon Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) is on the planet's near side, about 180,000 kilometers (112,000 miles) closer to Cassini than Saturn, in this scene.

The view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from less than a degree below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 22, 2007 at a distance of approximately 927,000 kilometers (576,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 56 kilometers (35 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