Saturn's moon Prometheus chases Pandora in this Cassini view, but the
outcome of their race has already been decided by gravity. Prometheus
orbits closer to Saturn and thus moves faster than does Pandora.
Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across. Pandora is 84 kilometers
(52 miles) across.
This view is from a third of a degree beneath the ringplane. Familiar ring
features that are visible from higher angles above the rings are
foreshortened here. The planet's dark shadow stretches across the
ringplane at center.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 8, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.8
million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 10
kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Prometheus and Pandora.
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 operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.