CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
The Ring Sculptor

The Ring Sculptor
PIA 08262
Avg Rating: 5.68/10

Movie 214x437:
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The Ring Sculptor
PIA 08262
Avg Rating: 8.91/10

Still Image 301x609:
JPEG 13 KB
PNG 63 KB
TIFF 184 KB
   Prometheus zooms across Cassini's field of view, attended by faint streamers and deep gores in the F ring. This movie sequence of five images shows the F ring shepherd moon shaping the ring's inner edge.

Note that the faint ringlet coincident with the orbit of Prometheus (86 kilometers, 53 miles across) decreases sharply in brightness behind the moon in its path. The normally twisted-looking F ring core is overexposed in the images, causing its appearance to be more uniform than it usually is.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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 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: September 8, 2006 (PIA 08262)
Image/Caption Information