This sweeping view from Cassini gives a sense of the awesome scale of the
planet's disk-like ring system, which stretches many thousands of
kilometers into the distance. The shepherd moon Prometheus (102
kilometers, or 63 miles across) maintains a lonely sojourn with the thin,
outer F ring.
A notable brightening of the F ring material is visible ahead of
Prometheus in its orbit, near the right side of this image.
The view was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1
million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a
Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. The image
scale is 6 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.