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Pan In the Middle

Sept. 10, 2012
Saturn's tiny moon Pan orbits in the middle of the Encke Gap of the planet's A ring in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Pan is visible as a bright dot in the gap near the center of this view.

Saturn's tiny moon Pan orbits in the middle of the Encke Gap of the planet's A ring in this image from the Cassini spacecraft.

Pan (17 miles, or 28 kilometers across) is visible as a bright dot in the gap near the center of this view. See PIA12604 to see Pan casting a long shadow around the time of Saturn's August 2009 equinox.

The wide Roche Division separates the A ring from the thin F ring in the lower left quarter of the view. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 20 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 25, 2012. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Pan. Image scale is 7 miles (12 kilometers) 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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