Set starkly against the blackness of space are the F ring's delicate
strands which are periodically gored by its shepherding moon, Prometheus.
Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) and Pandora (81 kilometers,
or 50 miles across) both interact with the ring but neither is visible
here. Prometheus has the larger effect. See PIA08397 for a movie of Prometheus
creating a streamer-channel in the ring.
A star can be seen through the ring in the lower third of the image.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 33
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 11, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (620,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37
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.
