This computer-assembled two-image mosaic of Saturn's rings, taken by NASA's Voyager 1 on Nov. 6, 1980 at a range of 8 million kilometers (5 million miles), shows approximately 95 individual concentric features in the rings. The extraordinarily complex structure of the rings is easily seen across the entire span of the ring system. The ring structure, once thought to be produced by the gravitational interaction between Saturn's satellites and the orbit of ring particles, has now been found to be too complex for this explanation alone. The 14th satellite of Saturn, discovered by Voyager 1, is seen (upper left) just inside the narrow F-ring, which is less than 150 kilometers (93 miles wide).
The Voyager Project is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
|Target||Saturn Rings||F Ring, Saturn|
|Instrument Host||Voyager 1||Voyager 2|
|Host Type||Flyby Spacecraft|
|Instrument||Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)|
|Date in Caption||1980-11-06|