The Rings Make a Point

This perspective, from just beneath Saturn's ringplane, gives the rings a pointed appearance and captures a few clumps at the edge of the narrow F ring. Tethys (1,071 kilometers, 665 miles across) floats peacefully in the distance.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 12, 2006, at a distance of approximately 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 25 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel on Tethys.

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