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Pan's Ringlet

Dec. 24, 2008
Pan orbits in the Encke gap near the middle of this image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Nov. 5, 2008. Also visible is one of the three dusty ringlets that reside in the Encke gap.

Pan orbits in the Encke gap near the middle of this image.

Also visible is one of the three dusty ringlets that reside in the Encke gap.

Near the top of the image, the F ring puts in an appearance as well.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 5, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.309 million kilometers (813,000 miles) from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 32 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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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