Seen here is the end result of the process that occurs every time the moon
Prometheus closely approaches Saturn's F ring. The moon cuts a dark
channel in the ring's inner edge that then shears out over successive
orbits, giving the inner edge of the ring the grooved appearance seen here.
This process is described in detail, along with a movie of Prometheus
creating one of the streamer/channel features, in PIA08397.
The view is toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees below
the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 25, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 624,000 kilometers (388,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 23 degrees. Image scale is 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
