Nasa Cassini Image: Saturn's rings form a majestic arc over the planet

Saturn's rings appear to form a majestic arc over the planet in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 17 degrees above the ringplane. 

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 15, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 705 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 657,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 2 degrees. Image scale is 37 miles (60 kilometers) 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 (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) 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.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute