The fragile F ring bears the signs of a moon's bruising passage.
The A ring and its Keeler Gap sit idly by on the right of this image, but
on the left dark lines cut across the F ring and mark where the moon
Prometheus has gored the ring and gravitationally drawn streamer-channels
of material from the ring (see PIA10509). To the left and right of the bright
core, the F ring also displays the ghostly stands of its spiral arm (see
PIAPIA07717) which winds around the planet like a compressed spring.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 11 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 2, 2009. The view was acquired at
a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from
Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees.
Image scale is 7 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.
