CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Close to the Shepherd Moons

This spectacular image shows Prometheus and Pandora, with their flock of icy ring particles (the F ring) between them. Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across, at left) is exterior to the ring, and closer to the spacecraft here. Each of the shepherd satellites has an unusual shape, with a few craters clearly visible.

The effect of Prometheus (86 kilometers, 53 miles across, at right) on the F ring is visible as it pulls material out of the ring when it is farthest from Saturn in its orbit.

The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 29, 2005, at a distance of approximately 459,000 kilometers (285,000 miles) from Pandora and 483,500 kilometers (300,500 miles) from Prometheus. The image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel on Pandora and 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel on Prometheus. The view was acquired from about a third of a degree below the ringplane.

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: December 15, 2005 (PIA 07653)
Image/Caption Information 		  Close to the Shepherd Moons
PIA 07653
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