In Saturn's Shadow Poster

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun's blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world. This marvellous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Colour in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural colour. The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn's shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that compose Saturn's faint rings. Ring structures containing these tiny particles brighten substantially at high phase angles: i.e., viewing angles where the sun is almost directly behind the objects being imaged. During this period of observation Cassini detected two new faint rings: one coincident with the shared orbit of the moons Janus and Epimetheus, and another coincident with Pallene's orbit. (See PIA08322 and PIA08328 for more on the two new rings.) The narrowly confined G ring is easily seen here, outside the bright main rings. Encircling the entire system is the much more extended E ring. The icy plumes of Enceladus, whose eruptions supply the E ring particles, betray the moon's position in the E ring's left-side edge. Interior to the G ring and above the brighter main rings is the pale dot of Earth. Cassini views its point of origin from over a billion kilometres (and close to a billion miles) away in the icy depths of the outer solar system. See PIA08324 for a similar view of Earth taken during this observation. Small grains are pushed about by sunlight and electromagnetic forces. Hence, their distribution tells much about the local space environment. A second version of the mosaic view is presented here in which the colour contrast is greatly exaggerated. In such views, imaging scientists have noticed colour variations across the diffuse rings that imply active processes sort the particles in the ring according to their sizes. Looking at the E ring in this colour-exaggerated view, the distribution of colour across and along the ring appears to be different between the right side and the left. Scientists are not sure yet how to explain these differences, though the difference in phase angle between right and left may be part of the explanation. The phase angle is about 179 degrees on Saturn. The main rings are overexposed in a few places. This view looks towards the unlit side of the rings from about 15 degrees above the ringplane. Cassini was approximately 2.2 million kilometres (1.3 million miles) from Saturn when the images in this mosaic were taken. Image scale on Saturn is about 260 kilometres (162 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 centre is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.