NASA: Cassini spacecraft looks toward the brilliant disk of Saturn, Hidden Wonders

NASA's Cassini shuttle looks toward the splendid plate of Saturn, encompassed by the cold paths of its rings. Black out wisps of cloud are obvious in the environment. At base, ring shadows follow fragile, bending lines over the planet.

Prometheus (53 miles or 86 kilometers over) is only a couple of pixels wide in this view, scarcely noticeable as a dull spot before the planet, underneath the rings and to one side of focus.

Amongst April and September 2017, Cassini will dive more than once through the crevice that isolates the planet from the rings.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about a degree over the ring plane. The picture was brought in green light with the Cassini shuttle wide-point camera on July 21, 2016.

The view was acquired at a separation of around 529,000 miles (852,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-rocket, or stage, point of 37 degrees. Picture scale is 30 miles (50 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is an agreeable venture of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, deals with the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two locally available cameras were composed, created and collected at JPL. The imaging operations focus is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.