The Agitator

Prometheus and Saturn's rings
PIA NumberPIA09006
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Prometheus glides across the scene from left to right, sculpting and perturbing particles in Saturn's F ring. The bright core of the F ring is visible near the ring's ansa, or outer edge.

Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across.

This view looks toward the illuminated side of the rings from about 2 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 28, 2007 at a distance of approximately 279,000 kilometers (174,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 17 kilometers (11 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.

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