From just outside the faint edge of Saturn's F ring, the moon Pandora
keeps watch over her fine-grained flock. The outer flanks of the F ring
region are populated by ice particles approaching the size of the
particles comprising smoke. As a shepherd moon, Pandora helps her cohort
Prometheus confine and shape the main F ring. Pandora is 84 kilometers
(52 miles) across.
Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) wide and orbits interior to the F
ring.
The small knot seen attached to the core is one of several that Cassini
scientists are eyeing as they attempt to distinguish embedded moons from
transient clumps of material (see PIA07716).
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Aug. 2, 2005, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 930 nanometers at a distance of approximately 610,000
kilometers (379,000 miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 146 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
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.
