Prometheus Lurking in the Rings

Prometheus and Saturn's rings
PIA NumberPIA10532
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Prometheus shows up bright in this image of the dark side of the rings.

The bright band that appears above Prometheus in this image is the Cassini division separating the (very dark) B ring and the A ring. The C ring, interior to the B ring, is clearly visible.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 20, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.076 million kilometers (668,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 5, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 869,000 kilometers (540,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 4 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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