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Shifting Strands

April 12, 2007
The shepherd moon Prometheus is lit partly by reflected light from Saturn as it lurks near the heavily perturbed F ring as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The shepherd moon Prometheus is lit partly by reflected light from Saturn as it lurks near the heavily perturbed F ring.

The left side of Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is overexposed by the blinding Sun, but hints of craters can be seen on the Saturn-lit side.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 52 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 16, 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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