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Pandora on a String

Dec. 7, 2005
This dramatic image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn's craggy moon Pandora skimming along the F ring's outer edge. Pandora orbits about 1,000 kilometers exterior to the ring, but in this view is projected onto the ring.

This dramatic image shows Saturn's craggy moon Pandora skimming along the F ring's outer edge.

Pandora orbits about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) exterior to the ring, but in this view is projected onto the ring. The moderately high-resolution of the image reveals the moonlet's odd shape. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.

The image was acquired from less than a degree below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 29, 2005, at a distance of approximately 455,000 kilometers (283,000 miles) from Pandora. The 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.

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