The Cassini spacecraft tracks the shepherd moon Prometheus as it orbits
Saturn.
This image is part of a sequence designed to monitor the evolution of a
streamer of material in the F ring for nearly a full orbit, as it follows
Prometheus. Here, Prometheus is just about to pass behind the planet. The
faint streamer lies below and to the right of Prometheus (86 kilometers,
or 53 miles across), in the faint, inner strand of the F ring.
See PIA08397 for a movie sequence of Cassini images that shows Prometheus
creating a streamer.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 21
degrees above the ringplane. Saturn's upper atmosphere distorts the image
of the rings near the planet's limb.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 9, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (804,000 miles) from Prometheus.
Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.
