Straight Across the Rings

The small ring moon Atlas, on the far side of Saturn's immense ring system
PIA NumberPIA06635
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The small ring moon Atlas is seen here, on the far side of Saturn's immense ring system. Cassini
was only 0.6 degrees above the ring plane when this image was taken. Atlas is 32 kilometers (20
miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March
11, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (957,000 miles) from Atlas and at
a Sun-Atlas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 9
kilometers (6 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute,
Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .
For
additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute