Prometheus speeds ahead of two dark gores in the F ring's inner edge. The
ring's bright core swerves and twirls in its wake.
Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is partly lit, at right,
by reflected light from Saturn.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 54
degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.8
million kilometers (1.1 miles) from Prometheus and at a
Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 107 degrees. Image scale is
11 kilometers (7 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
