This new Cassini image captures a side view of Saturn and its rings.
Saturn’s rings appear to form a majestic arc over the planet in this image from the Cassini spacecraft.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 17 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 15, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 705 nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 657,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 2 degrees. Image scale is 37 miles (60 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, Colorado.
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2 Comments
What an amazing resolution of that shot of the Sarurm Rings and the amazingly sharp demarkation of the gaps.
The miracle of Saturn’s rings are due to the extremely fast rotation of the planet at 9.69km/sec in sun’s orbit compared with that of the earth. Moreover the spin velocity is so great such that Saturn which is 1000 times more volumenous than earth just spins around itself in just 10 hours. Moreover the wind speed on Saturn is also greatest at more than 560 km/hour. These factors contribute to the highly elliptic rings to turn so fast that the dust and ice on the rings leave a neat streak overlapping one over the other and being concentric gives a splendid sight. Thus this is the best sight when compared with other ringed planets like Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Thank you for the real high resolution photo of Saturn rings.