Northward Through the Rings

The Cassini spacecraft peers through the gossamer strands of Saturn's innermost rings, whose own shadows adorn the planet beyond.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 35 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 21, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 620,000 kilometers (385,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 67 kilometers (42 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 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