As Prometheus pulls away from an encounter with Saturn's F ring, its
immediate effects on the ring material are clear. The moon has pulled
toward it a faint streamer of material from the inner, flanking ringlet
and even created a modest bulge in the ring's bright core.
Above the moon in this image is the feature created during the previous
passage of Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across). The older
streamer feature has sheared diagonally over the course of an orbit,
becoming a dark channel. This too is the fate of the newly created
streamer.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 14 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 6, 2008. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (635,000 miles) from
Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 32
degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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.
