Fresh from an encounter with Saturn's F ring, the moon Prometheus
continues in its orbit.
The gravity of potato-shaped Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles
across) periodically creates streamer-channels in the F ring. See
PIA10461 and PIA10593 to learn more. To watch a movie of this process,
see PIA08397. Most of Prometheus is overexposed in this image.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 44 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 24, 2009. The view was obtained at
a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from
Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75
degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.