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Moon at Work

March 28, 2007
Saturn's shepherd moon Prometheus draws material from the F ring along an invisible thread of gravity. Near lower left is an identical feature the moon created on a previous pass near the ring as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Prometheus draws material from the F ring along an invisible thread of gravity. Near lower left is an identical feature the moon created on a previous pass near the ring.

Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is overexposed in this image, which was taken as part of a sequence designed to help refine scientists' understanding of the orbits of Saturn's small moons.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 41 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 14, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Prometheus. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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