Streaming F Ring

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Caption:

This image taken by the narrow angle camera on the Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn's F ring. It was re-projected to appear as a straight line. The bright object to the lower left is the moon Prometheus, which appears elongated due to the re-projection. A faint stream of material, or streamer, appears to be connecting the moon to the ring. This streamer probably formed when Prometheus bobbed up and down in its orbit around Saturn and caused periodic perturbations to the F ring.

The vertical scale is from 139, 000 kilometers to 141,000 kilometers (86,300 miles to 87,600 miles). The horizontal scale is 20 degrees, or one-eighteenth of the entire F ring. This image was taken in mid-June, 2004.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras, were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

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