A soft collision between Prometheus and the F ring created the dark
channel goring the ring in the bottom of this image.
And, like a silhouette sneaking away from the scene, the lit limb of
Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) is visible near the top of
the image.
This image is a mosaic of two images taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 2, 2009. This view looks
toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 24 degrees below the
ringplane. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 567,000
kilometers (352,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 148 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
