This image or video was catalogued by Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under Photo ID: PIA05075. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing. Other languages: Afrikaans ∙ العربية ∙ беларуская (тарашкевіца) ∙ български ∙ Bahaso Jambi ∙ català ∙ čeština ∙ dansk ∙ Deutsch ∙ English ∙ español ∙ فارسی ∙ français ∙ galego ∙ magyar ∙ հայերեն ∙ Bahasa Indonesia ∙ italiano ∙ 日本語 ∙ македонски ∙ മലയാളം ∙ Nederlands ∙ polski ∙ português ∙ русский ∙ sicilianu ∙ slovenščina ∙ Türkçe ∙ українська ∙ 简体中文 ∙ 繁體中文 ∙ +/−

The best view of Saturn's rings in the ultraviolet indicates there is more ice toward the outer part of the rings, than in the inner part, hinting at the origins of the rings and their evolution.

Images taken during the Cassini spacecraft's orbital insertion on June 30 show compositional variation in the A, B and C rings. From the inside out, the "Cassini Division" in faint red at left is followed by the A ring in its entirety. The Cassini Division at left contains thinner, dirtier rings than the turquoise A ring, indicating a more icy composition. The red band roughly three-fourths of the way outward in the A ring is known as the Encke gap.

The ring system begins from the inside out with the D, C, B and A rings followed by the F, G and E rings. The red in the image indicates sparser ringlets likely made of "dirty," and possibly smaller, particles than in the icier turquoise ringlets.

This image was taken with the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph instrument, which is capable of resolving the rings to show features up to 97 kilometers (60 miles) across, roughly 100 times the resolution of ultraviolet data obtained by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph was built at, and the team is based at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph team home page, http://lasp.colorado.edu/cassini/.

	This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
	Warnings: Use of NASA logos, insignia and emblems is restricted per U.S. law 14 CFR 1221. The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain. Materials based on Hubble Space Telescope data may be copyrighted if they are not explicitly produced by the STScI.[1] See also {{PD-Hubble}} and {{Cc-Hubble}}. The SOHO (ESA & NASA) joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. [2] Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. [3] The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) site has been known to host copyrighted content. Its photo gallery FAQ states that all of the images in the photo gallery are in the public domain "Unless otherwise noted."