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A-Ring Odyssey

July 3, 2007
Immense Saturn is visible through the A ring as Pan coasts along its private corridor as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Immense Saturn is visible through the A ring as Pan coasts along its private corridor.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 24 degrees above the ringplane. Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) drifts through the Encke Gap (325 kilometers, or 200 miles wide).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 23, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Pan. 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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