Prometheus Emerges

Prometheus emerges from Saturn's shadow in this image taken of the dark side of the rings.

Since it is nearing the equinox at Saturn, the Sun is very nearly in the ring plane, causing Prometheus to cast its own diminutive shadow on the F ring next to Saturn's enormous one.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 29, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.24 million kilometers (771,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (5 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.