Prometheus—lit partly by direct sunlight and partly by saturnshine—pulls
at material in the inner portion of the F ring. Saturnshine is sunlight
reflected by the Ringed Planet, which often brightens the night sides of
Saturn's moons.
This view looks toward irregularly shaped Prometheus (102 kilometers, or
63 miles across at its widest point) and the unilluminated side of the
rings from about 41 degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 10, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (743,000 miles) from Prometheus
and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 59 degrees. Image
scale is 7 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.