Two of Saturn's ring moons draw close momentarily, before the inner of the
pair moves off alone.
Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across, at center right) passes
Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across, at center left) about once
a month, then slowly and steadily pulls ahead of its slower moving
sibling.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 23
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 6, 2008. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (975,000
miles) from Atlas. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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.