Inner C Ring

Bright ringlets and dark gaps at the inner edge of the C ring sweep across this scene. The C ring contains numerous "plateaus" -- broad ring regions that are bright with fainter material on both sides.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 23, 2006. The view was captured from 14 degrees below the ring plane and at a distance of approximately 272,000 kilometers (169,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute