F Ring Fender Bender

A soft collision between Prometheus and the F ring created the dark channel goring the ring in the bottom of this image.

And, like a silhouette sneaking away from the scene, the lit limb of Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) is visible near the top of the image.

This image is a mosaic of two images taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 2, 2009. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 24 degrees below the ringplane. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 567,000 kilometers (352,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 148 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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.