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The Ringsmith

May 26, 2008
On Apr. 22, 2008, NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured Saturn's moon, Prometheus, tugging icy particles from the F ring into fanciful shapes like ropes of glowing neon.

Prometheus tugs icy particles from the F ring into fanciful shapes like ropes of glowing neon.

Although Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) is overexposed here, the moon's irregular outline is quite easy to see.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 7 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 22, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (652,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 6 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.

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