In this image of the F ring, taken shortly after its ring particles
encountered the shepherd moon Prometheus, the disruption to the ring
caused by the moon is evident.
The bright core of the ring and its neighboring faint strands show kinks
where the moon's gravity has altered the orbits of the ring particles.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 23, 2008 at a distance of approximately
444,000 kilometers (276,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 88 degrees. Image scale is 2
kilometers (1 mile) 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.
