Angling Saturn
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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