Straightening Out the Kinks

Saturn's F ring, which appears kinked and gored in many images, looks straight here. Above the brighter core, the ghostly strands of the F ring's outer envelope, which has a spiral arm structure, are visible.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 67 degrees above the ringplane.The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 8, 2008 at a distance of approximately 622,000 kilometers (386,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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