Pulling Away

Prometheus—lit partly by direct sunlight and partly by saturnshine—pulls at material in the inner portion of the F ring. Saturnshine is sunlight reflected by the Ringed Planet, which often brightens the night sides of Saturn's moons.

This view looks toward irregularly shaped Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across at its widest point) and the unilluminated 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 10, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (743,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 59 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.