Prometheus draws a fresh streamer of material from the F ring as it passes
the ring's interior edge. The streamer will continuously shear out as it
orbits the planet, becoming more elongated and increasingly aligned with
the F ring with time.
A single large crater is the principle feature visible on Prometheus (102
kilometers, or 63 miles across) in this view. The moon is lit partly by
bright sunlight and partly by reflected light from Saturn.
This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 57 degrees
above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 11, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7
million kilometers (1.1 miles) from Prometheus and at a
Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 130 degrees. Image scale is
10 kilometers (6 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
