Cassini pierced the ring plane and rounded Saturn on Oct. 27,
2004, capturing this view of the dark portion of the rings. A
portion of the planet's atmosphere is visible here, as is its
shadow on the surface of the rings. The image was taken with the
Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera on Oct. 27, 2004, at a
distance of about 618,000 kilometers (384,000 miles) from Saturn
through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 1001 nanometers. The image scale is 33 kilometers
(21 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science,
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. For more information, about the