As it completed its first orbit of Saturn, Cassini zoomed in on the rings
to catch this wondrous view of the shepherd moon Prometheus (102
kilometers, or 63 miles across) working its influence on the
multi-stranded and kinked F ring.
The F ring resolves into five separate strands in this closeup view.
Potato-shaped Prometheus is seen here, connected to the ringlets by a
faint strand of material. Imaging scientists are not sure exactly how
Prometheus is interacting with the F ring here, but they have speculated
that the moon might be gravitationally pulling material away from the
ring. The ringlets are disturbed in several other places. In some,
discontinuities or "kinks" in the ringlets are seen; in others, gaps in
the diffuse inner strands are seen. All these features appear to be due
to the influence of Prometheus.
The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on Oct.
29, 2004, at a distance of about 782,000 kilometers (486,000 miles) from
Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 147
degrees. The image scale is 4.7 kilometers (2.9 miles) per pixel. The
image has been magnified by a factor of two, and contrast was enhanced,
to aid visibility.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.