A fleet of small moons patrols the outskirts of Saturn's icy rings.
The shepherd moons Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) and
Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) are seen respectively interior
and exterior to the narrow F ring at lower left.
Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) appears at center right, and
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is visible at lower right.
A 2007 movie sequence acquired during a Cassini ringplane crossing
(PIA08356) presents a similar view, with moons in motion.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 14
degrees above the ringplane. A background star is faintly visible directly
between Prometheus and Mimas.
The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on March 16, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (960,000 miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 97 kilometers (60 miles) per pixel.
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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.