Saturn's shepherd moon Prometheus hovers between the A and F rings as if
suspended on an invisible thread, while bright clouds drift in Saturn's
atmosphere approximately 130,000 kilometers (81,000 miles) beyond. It is
noteworthy that such clouds are visible here in the shadows cast by the
rings.
Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across.
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. This view was processed to enhance fine
details.
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.
