The moon Prometheus is seen here in its never-ending perturbation of
Saturn's F ring.
Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) periodically gores the F
ring, drawing out streamers of material from the ring. For a movie showing
this process, see PIA08397.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 64 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 12, 2009. The view was obtained at
a distance of approximately 950,000 kilometers (590,000 miles) from Saturn
and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 93 degrees. Image scale
is 5 kilometers (3 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.
