Ring World Highlights

The Encke and Keeler gaps are visible in this image of the outer A ring. Brightness variations are clearly visible in the Encke ringlet. A density wave can be seen exterior to (to the left of) the...

This image shows a rare and powerful storm on the night side of Saturn. Light from Saturn's rings (called "ringshine") provided the illumination, allowing the storm and other cloud features to be ...

NASA's Dawn spacecraft took these images of dwarf planet Ceres. The map overlaid on the right gives scientists hints about Ceres' internal structure.

                  Saturn's Sunlit Rings July 1, 2004     After becoming the first spacecraft to enter Saturn's orbit,...

The Cassini spacecraft carried the European Space Agency's Huygens probe to Saturn and released it in December 2004. The probe landed on Titan Jan. 14, 2005, acquiring a set of images using the de...

This view, like PIA08303, shows Prometheus with a streamer it has created in the inner edge of the F ring.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft took images of Haulani Crater at a distance of 240 miles (385 kilometers) from the surface of Ceres.

Saturn's moon Janus shows the scars of impacts in this Cassini spacecraft image of craters light and dark. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles acro...

This image was taken during Cassini's extremely close encounter with Enceladus on Oct. 9, 2008. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 9, 2008, a distance of a...

This image of asteroid Vesta from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows part of a large crater with a relatively fresh rim located in Vesta's Numisia quadrangle, near the equator.

Cassini captured this arresting view of Saturn just before Epimetheus crossed into the blinding glare of the planet's sunlit crescent and was lost. As it orbits Saturn, Epimetheus (116 kilometers,...

Saturn and its moon Titan as seen by Pioneer 11 in 1973.

The soft, bright-and-dark bands displayed by Saturn in this view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft are the signature of methane in the planet's atmosphere.

This artist's rendering is imaged near the center of Herschel crater, which occupies a large portion of Mimas' leading hemisphere. The near ice formations comprise the central mountains of the cra...

This global digital map of Rhea was created using data taken during Cassini and Voyager spacecraft flybys. The map is an equidistant projection and has a scale of 417 meters (1,370 feet) per pixel...

During a distant flyby encounter with Enceladus, Cassini imaged the moon's wrinkled leading hemisphere. At the scale visible here, this region of the surface is generally devoid of impact craters, ...

This image, taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows a portion of the northern hemisphere of dwarf planet Ceres from an altitude of 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers). The image, with a resolution of 1,4...

Wendy Darling famously helped Peter Pan catch his shadow, and now Cassini captures the shadow of another Pan: Saturn's 30-kilometer (19-mile) wide moon inhabiting the Encke Gap. In the center of t...

This image shows grooves in the southern part of Saturn's moon Enceladus. 

This artist's impression by the European Space Agency shows NASA's Cassini spacecraft exploring the magnetic environment of Saturn. The image is not to scale. Saturn's magnetosphere is depicted in ...

Tiny Epimetheus is dwarfed by adjacent slivers of the A and F rings. But is it really? Looks can be deceiving!

+ View related feature story + View unlabeled image Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have spotted two features shaped like the 1980s video game icon "Pac-Man" on moons of Saturn. One wa...

Saturn's D ring may be faint and difficult to observe, but it rewards our patience. In this image, the Cassini spacecraft has captured some of the structure of the tenuous ring, appearing here as l...

This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft of asteroid Vesta shows Lepida crater, located in Vesta's Floronia quadrangle, in Vesta's northern hemisphere.

This map of Titan's surface brightness was assembled from images taken by the Cassini spacecraft over the past year, both as it approached the Saturn system and during three closer flybys in July, ...