Disturbing Moons

This mosaic of two Cassini images shows Pan and Prometheus creating features in nearby rings.

Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across), in the Encke Gap at left, is trailed by a series of edge waves in the outer boundary of the gap. Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across at its widest point) just touches the inner edge of Saturn's F ring at right, and is followed by a series of dark channels in the ring, which were caused by the passage of Prometheus through the F ring on previous orbits.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ringplane. The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 15, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Pan and Prometheus. Image scale is 7 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on both moons.

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.