Media Information

 
 
 
Collection:
NASA Cassini-Huygens Collection
Title:
The Color of Darkness
Description:
The Color of Darkness
Full Description:
Sunlight filters through Saturn's rings in sepia tones in this artful view from the Cassini spacecraft of the dark side of the rings. Those rays from the sun directly reflected from the lit side of the rings onto the planet strike and illuminate the night-side southern hemisphere.

The densely populated B ring blocks much of the Sun's light and thus looks quite dark.

Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) is a mere sliver below left.

Unprocessed wide-angle camera images taken in a high-phase viewing geometry generally contain stray light artifacts. These have largely been removed from this image by computer image processing.

Cassini was about 3 degrees above the ringplane when this image was obtained on Sept. 6, 2006. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were taken using the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraf t, or phase, angle of 154 degrees. Image scale is 106 kilometers (66 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.n…. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Date:
October 6, 2006
Keywords:
gallery
Keywords:
images
Keywords:
Cassini
Keywords:
mission
Keywords:
Huygens
Keywords:
probe
Keywords:
Saturn
Keywords:
explore
Keywords:
videos
Keywords:
movies
Keywords:
Jupiter
Keywords:
flyby
Keywords:
spacecraft
Keywords:
assembly
Keywords:
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Keywords:
flight
Keywords:
operations facilities
Keywords:
mpeg
Keywords:
Quicktime
facet_what:
Saturn
facet_what:
Cassini
facet_what:
Jupiter
facet_what:
Cassini-Huygens
facet_what:
Huygens Probe
facet_what:
Cassini Orbiter
facet_what:
Sun
facet_what:
Tethys
facet_where:
Saturn
facet_where:
Jupiter
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
facet_where:
California
facet_where:
Washington
facet_where:
Tethys
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
facet_where:
Washington, D.C.
facet_when:
October 6, 2006
facet_when_year:
2006
UID:
SPD-SATRN-2300
original url:

The Color of Darkness