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Eyes on the Rings

Oct. 17, 2008
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward the sunlit face of Saturn's rings, whose shadows continue to slide southward on the planet toward their temporary disappearance during equinox in August 2009.

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the sunlit face of Saturn's rings, whose shadows continue to slide southward on the planet toward their temporary disappearance during equinox in August 2009.

This two-frame color mosaic was created from images taken as part of a photometry observation of the rings. Photometry observations are useful for determining a host of ring particle properties.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 22, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (728,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 66 kilometers (41 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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