CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Prometheus' Handiwork

Prometheus' Handiwork
PIA 17158
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   Saturn's moon Prometheus orbits near some of its handiwork in the F ring.

Prometheus (53 miles, 86 kilometers across) and its partner Pandora gravitationally sculpt and maintain the narrow F ring.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 53 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 24, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 104 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Released: March 31, 2014 (PIA 17158)
Image/Caption Information


Alliance Member Comments
NeKto (Apr 2, 2014 at 9:43 AM):
i have fun with so many of the images here. anyone else visualize Prometheus as a tooth paste tube squeezing out the F ring?