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Prometheus Lurking in the Rings

Dec. 11, 2008
Prometheus shows up bright in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft of the dark side of the rings. The bright band that appears above Prometheus in this image is the Cassini division separating the (very dark) B ring and the A ring.

Prometheus shows up bright in this image of the dark side of the rings.

The bright band that appears above Prometheus in this image is the Cassini division separating the (very dark) B ring and the A ring. The C ring, interior to the B ring, is clearly visible.

10532The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 20, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.076 million kilometers (668,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 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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