Saturn's moon Prometheus is seen here emerging from the darkness of
Saturn's shadow. Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across.
This shepherd moon, like most of Saturn's moons, always keeps the same
face pointing toward the planet. An observer on the moon's Saturn-facing
side would never see the Sun directly overhead at noon, for the planet
would always be in the way (creating an eclipse). Instead, the Sun would
rise in the east, but as noon approached the eclipse would begin,
bringing darkness a second time. Night comes twice on Prometheus.
This 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.
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.
