NASA AT WORK--The Cassini spacecraft takes an angled view toward Saturn, showing
the southern reaches of the planet with the rings on a dramatic diagonal. North
on Saturn is up and rotated 16 degrees to the left. This view looks toward the
southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 14 degrees below the
ringplane. The rings cast wide shadows on the planet's southern hemisphere.
The moon Enceladus (313
miles, or 504 kilometers across) appears as a small, bright speck in the lower
left of the image. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle
camera on June 15, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) from
Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. Image
scale is 11 miles (17 kilometers) 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.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space
Science Institute
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