Grooves on Blue

The Cassini spacecraft peers through Saturn's delicate, translucent inner C ring to see the diffuse blue limb of Saturn's atmosphere.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 20 degrees above the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 25, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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