The oddball shapes of Saturn's small ring moons Prometheus and Epimetheus
are discernible in the view from Cassini. Saturn's shadow carves a dark,
diagonal swath across the ring plane, even occulting the outer edge of
thin, knotted F ring. Prometheus is 102 kilometers, or 63 miles across,
while Epimetheus is 116 kilometers, or 72 miles across.
Prometheus is visible inside the F ring near center, and Epimetheus is
seen near the lower right corner. North on Saturn is to the upper right.
The view is from beneath the ring plane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Jan. 22, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.6 million
kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 15
kilometers (9 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.
