PIA08922: Ahead of the Pack

Prometheus speeds ahead of two dark gores in the F ring's inner edge. The ring's bright core swerves and twirls in its wake.

Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is partly lit, at right, by reflected light from Saturn.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 54 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 107 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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.