Warp Zone

Prometheus, Saturn and its rings
January 8, 2008
PIA NumberPIA09810
Language
  • english

A small moon appears from behind giant Saturn, accompanied by a warped view of the rings.

Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is seen here between the A and F rings. Close to the planet, the image of the rings is slightly distorted by Saturn's upper atmosphere.

This view is similar to Spotting the Shepherd, which features Pandora.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 9 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 30, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Prometheus. 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.

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