Prometheus is caught here, in the act of pulling a new streamer out of the
F ring's inner edge. Trailing behind (above the moon in the image) are
previous dark gores that Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across)
has created.
See PIA08397 for a thorough description of how the moon creates these features.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 5
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 14, 2007. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1
million miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 67 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.