Prometheus poses here with its latest creation: a dark, diagonal gore in
the tenuous material interior to Saturn's F ring. The shepherd moon
creates a new gore each time it comes closest to the F ring in its orbit
of Saturn, and the memory of previous passes is preserved in the rings's
structure for some time afterward. Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles)
across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately
499,000 kilometers (310,000 miles) from Saturn and at a high
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 144 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 3 kilometers (2 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 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
