Between the Spokes

This low-phase Cassini image shows bright areas between dark spokes in Saturn's B ring.

The dark spokes are not as conspicuous here as the bright regions separating them. The view was acquired at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 40 degrees. To learn more about these short-lived radial markings, see 'Tis the Season for Spokes.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 16 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 10, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 65 kilometers (40 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