About ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Highlights
Latest
Space in Member States
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Germany
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Spain
Estonia
Finland
France
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Norway
The Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Czechia
Romania
United Kingdom
Slovenia
Sweden
Switzerland
Science & Exploration
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicAstronauts
Latest
Enabling & Support
Making space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicLatest
View of an alien copper-coloured ring world
Cassini, the robotic emissary flying high above Saturn, captured this view of an alien copper-coloured ring world. The overexposed planet has deliberately been removed to show the unlit rings alone, seen from an elevation of 60°, the highest Cassini has yet attained.
The view is a mosaic of 27 images taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on 21 January 2007, over the course of about 45 minutes and at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometres from Saturn. Image scale is 90 kilometres per pixel.
The planet's shadow carves a dark swath across the ring plane at the right. Several moons of Saturn are also visible in this image: Epimetheus (116 kilometres across) at the 1 o'clock position, Pandora (84 kilometres across) at the 5 o'clock position, Janus (181 kilometres across) at the 10 o'clock position.
Bright clumps of material in the narrow F ring moved in their orbits between each of the colour exposures, creating a chromatic misalignment that provides some sense of the continuous motion in the ring system. Radially extending lens-flare artefacts, which result from light being scattered within the camera optics, are present in the view.
