Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

The Rings Make a Point

Caption: This perspective, from just beneath Saturn's ringplane, gives the rings a pointed appearance and captures a few clumps at the edge of the narrow F ring. Tethys (1,071 kilometers, 665 miles across) floats peacefully in the distance.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 12, 2006, at a distance of approximately 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 25 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel on Tethys.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Usage Restrictions: Image is in the public domain. Appropriate caption is requested.