CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Racing Rocks

Racing Rocks
PIA 07612
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   Prometheus (at left) chases Pandora in this Cassini view, but the outcome of their race has already been decided by gravity. Prometheus (86 kilometers, 53 miles across) orbits closer to Saturn and thus moves faster than does Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across).

This view is from a third of a degree beneath the ringplane. Familiar ring features that are visible from higher angles above the rings are foreshortened here. The planet's dark shadow stretches across the ringplane at center.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on September 8, 2005, from a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Prometheus and Pandora.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. 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-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: October 20, 2005 (PIA 07612)
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