PIA14657: A Shepherd's Watch


A Shepherd’s Watch

Caption:

Like a shepherd guarding his sheep, Prometheus keeps a lonely watch over the F ring.

Gravitational interactions between the ring and its shepherd moons, Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) and Pandora (not shown here), keep the F ring narrowly confined. The five small, bright dots in this image (one of them seen through the A ring, which is on the right) are stars.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 52 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 15, 2013.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 810,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 110 degrees. Image scale is 5 miles (8 kilometers) 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Prometheus
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2013-04-01
Date in Caption 2013-01-15
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA14657
Identifier PIA14657