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Encke's Moon

July 22, 2008
Saucer-shaped Pan glides through the Encke Gap in Saturn's rings in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on June 10, 2008.

Saucer-shaped Pan glides through the Encke Gap in Saturn's rings.

See PIA08405 for higher resolution views of the "saucer moons" Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across at its widest point) and Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across at its widest point).

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 20 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 10, 2008 at a distance of approximately 799,000 kilometers (496,000 miles) from Pan. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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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