A new ring and the old homesteadphotographed by Saturn spacecraft

"The orbiting Cassini spacecraft caught sight of the ring and other rare features when the Sun passed directly behind Saturn in what is known as an occultation, providing bright backlight to the rings...

"The new ring can be barely seen outside the brighter main rings of Saturn and inside the G and E rings. It coincides with the orbits of Saturn's moons Janus and Epimetheus, and NASA researchers said that meteoroid impacts on those moons may have kicked off particles that coalesced into the ring.

"Saturn has at least 47 known moons and at least seven rings. The joint U.S.-European Space Agency Cassini mission, launched in 1997, is spending four years examining Saturn...

"Cassini also caught a color picture of Earth, which appears to be a pale blue orb, nearly 1.5 billion kilometers or 930 million miles away.

"'Nothing has greater power to alter our perspective of ourselves and our place in the cosmos than these images of Earth we collect from faraway places like Saturn," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.