Lumpy Prometheus

Saturn's shepherd moon Prometheus reveals its elongated, irregular form to Cassini in this image. The moon's long axis points toward Saturn. Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across.

This view shows the southern part of the moon's anti-Saturn side (the face that always points away from Saturn).

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 7, 2005, at a distance of approximately 438,000 kilometers (272,000 miles) from Prometheus. Resolution in the original image was 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute