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

Toward the Dayside

Caption: Cassini swung in close to Saturn as it rounded the planet's night side, beginning another orbit and moving to progressively higher elevations in order to study the rings.

The view here is from 12 degrees above the ringplane, looking down toward the unlit side of the rings. Sunlight shines from beneath the rings, casting thin, curving shadows across the northern latitudes. The view of the planet is cut-off by the dense B ring near the bottom.

The image was taken in visible light with the wide angle camera on May 21, 2005, from a distance of approximately 582,000 kilometers (362,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 35 kilometers (22 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 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

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