Ring Herding

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Caption:

Prometheus pulls material from the tortured F ring in this highly detailed view. The aftereffects of the moon's other recent encounters with the ring are visible above as dark channels in the inner ringlet.

One of two F ring shepherd moons, Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about seven degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 1, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Prometheus. Image scale is 12 kilometers (8 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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