The Cassini spacecraft looks up from beneath the ringplane to spy Atlas hugging the outer edge of the A ring, above center.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 23, 2006, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across). The image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Atlas.
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.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.