Saturn’s Ring Patterns

Wave-like patterns in Saturn's rings and a nearly half-full Mimas are caught together in this image from Cassini. Mimas is 398 kilometers (247 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Nov. 19, 2004, at a distance of approximately 4.8 million kilometers (3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 29 kilometers (18 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org ,

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute