Atlas and the Rings

The Cassini spacecraft looks past Saturn's main rings to spy the tiny moon Atlas, which orbits between the main rings and the thin F ring.

The main rings are closer to the spacecraft than Atlas is, and the moon appears as only a small, white dot in the center of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. See PIA08906 and PIA08405 for other views of Atlas (19 miles, 30 kilometers across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 16, 2012. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 870,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) from Atlas. Image scale is 5 miles (8 kilometers) per pixel.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute