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Veil of Ice

Jan. 12, 2007
NASA's Cassini spacecraft stares toward Saturn through its gauzy veil of rings. The great ice-particle screen acts like a filter here, attenuating the glare from the planet and making its high altitude haze easy to see.

The Cassini spacecraft stares toward Saturn through its gauzy veil of rings. The great ice-particle screen acts like a filter here, attenuating the glare from the planet and making its high altitude haze easy to see.

The F ring shows off the faint ringlets flanking its core, and a single ringlet can be seen in the Encke Gap, crossing through center.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 18 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 4, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 161 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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