Moon and Its Handiwork

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Caption:

Prometheus interacts gravitationally with the inner flanking ringlets of the F ring, creating dark channels as it passes.

This image was taken in a complete azimuthal scan of the rings, during which Cassini followed Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) around the rings for one complete orbit, or about 14 hours.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 41 degrees above the ringplane. The moon is partly lit by sunlight (at left) and elsewhere lit by reflected light from Saturn.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 152 degrees. Image scale is 9 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel.

Background Info:

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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