Drawing the Drapes

 

Prometheus poses here with its latest creation: a dark, diagonal gore in

the tenuous material interior to Saturn's F ring. The shepherd moon

creates a new gore each time it comes closest to the F ring in its orbit

of Saturn, and the memory of previous passes is preserved in the rings's

structure for some time afterward. Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles)

across.

 

 

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft

narrow-angle camera on Aug. 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately

499,000 kilometers (310,000 miles) from Saturn and at a high

Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 144 degrees. Resolution in the

original image was 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 saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage ciclops.org.

 

 

credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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