Saturn’s moon Pan occupies the Encke Gap. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI Click to enlarge
Saturn’s moon Pan occupies the Encke Gap at the center of this image, which also displays some of the A ring’s intricate wave structure. Pan is 26 kilometers (16 miles) across.
The two most prominent bright banded features seen on the left side of the image are spiral density waves, which propagate outward through Saturn’s rings. The bright crests represent areas with higher ring particle densities.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately 794,000 kilometers (493,000 miles) from Pan. The image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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 .
Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release
Multiple space agencies are looking to send crewed missions to the Moon's southern polar region…
Last November, NASA's Lucy mission conducted a flyby of the asteroid Dinkinish, one of the…
Steven Hawking famously calculated that black holes should evaporate, converting into particles and energy over…
NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its…
The JWST is astronomers' best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect…
First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is…