Petite Moon

 

A bright arc within Saturn's faint G ring holds a tiny gift.

 

 

A small moonlet is just visible as a short streak near the ansa of the G

ring arc in the top of two versions of the same image. The second (bottom)

version of the image has been brightened to enhance the visibility of the

G ring. The other streaks in this version of the image are stars smeared

by the camera's long exposure time of 26 seconds. This version of the

image shows a gap in the G ring which was faintly visible in an earlier

Cassini movie (see PIA08327).

 

 

The moonlet, dubbed S/2008 S 1, is likely a major source of the material

of the G ring (see PIA11148).

 

 

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 1 degrees

below the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the

Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 28, 2009. The view was

acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000

miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27

degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team

homepage is at ciclops.org.credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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