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Saturn's ring shepherds CASSINI NEWS RELEASE Posted: July 19, 2005
The two moons are separated by about 69,000 kilometers (43,000 miles) in this view. The F ring, extending farthest to the right, contains a great deal of fine, icy material that is more the size of dust than the boulders thought to comprise the dense B ring. These tiny particles are particularly bright from this viewing geometry, especially at right near the ansa, or edge. At left of center, a couple of ringlets within the Encke gap (325 kilometers, or 200 miles wide) can also be easily seen due to their fine dust-sized material. The other dark features in the rings are density waves and bending waves. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera when Cassini was a mean distance of 1.85 million kilometers (1.15 million miles) from the moons. The image scale is about 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on both moons. 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. |
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This post-scrub news conference occurred at 4:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, July 13 following postponement of Discovery's launch. (31min 30sec file)
Play video:
Launch of space shuttle Discovery on the return to flight mission was scrubbed because of trouble with engine cutoff sensors in the external tank. (4min 45sec file)
The five-man, two-woman astronaut crew departs the Operations and Checkout Building to board the AstroVan for the ride to launch pad 39B. (3min 01sec file)
The astronauts -- in two groups -- don their launch and entry partial pressure suits before heading to the pad.
Discovery's seven astronauts gather around the dining room table in crew quarters for a pre-launch snack before suiting up and heading to the pad. (1min 53sec file)
Pad 39B's Rotating Service Structure is retracted from around shuttle Discovery Tuesday night in preparation for the first launch attempt. (4min 36sec file)
