Cassini peers through the icy particles that comprise Saturn's rings as
Prometheus sits perched on the planet's limb (edge). The rings cast
shadows on the planet, with darker regions corresponding to places where
the ring material is denser. The narrow dense regions are created by
gravitational resonances with moons, like Prometheus, that orbit near the
rings. Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across.
The thin, bright core of the F ring can be seen against the planet and
above Prometheus.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.1
million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 13
kilometers (8 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
