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Pandora Gets Kinky

Dec. 9, 2008
Pandora orbits near a kink in the F ring. Whether it was Prometheus or Pandora that created the kink is not obvious in this instance in this image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Oct. 15, 2008.

Pandora orbits near a kink in the F ring. Whether it was Prometheus or Pandora that created the kink is not obvious in this instance.

While not as impressive as the gores which Prometheus induces in the ring, the gravitational influence of this little moon is still important in shaping the F ring.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 15, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.026 million kilometers (637,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 38 degrees. 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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