Prometheus Makes Contact

The F ring shepherd moon Prometheus touches the face of Saturn once more before moving off into blackness and continuing in its orbit.

The F ring itself is visible as a thin line just below Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across).

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 18 degrees above the ringplane. North on Saturn is up and rotated about 30 degrees to the right.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 13, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Prometheus and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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 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 operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.