Summary

The Cassini spacecraft spies Pan speeding through the Encke Gap, its own private path around Saturn. Illumination is from the lower left here, revealing about half of Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) in sunlight.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 35 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (600,000 miles) from Pan. Image scale is 6 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.

Licensing

	This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
	Warnings: Use of NASA logos, insignia and emblems is restricted per U.S. law 14 CFR 1221. The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain. Materials based on Hubble Space Telescope data may be copyrighted if they are not explicitly produced by the STScI.[1] See also {{PD-Hubble}} and {{Cc-Hubble}}. The SOHO (ESA & NASA) joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. [2] Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. [3] The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) site has been known to host copyrighted content. Its photo gallery FAQ states that all of the images in the photo gallery are in the public domain "Unless otherwise noted."

Original upload log

• 2007-03-08 20:50 Davey1107 516×397×8 (16847 bytes) NASA image in public domain per NASA's fair sue policy. http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html