Bothersome Moon

The moon Prometheus is seen here in its never-ending perturbation of Saturn's F ring.

Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) periodically gores the F ring, drawing out streamers of material from the ring. For a movie showing this process, see Soft Collision.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 64 degrees below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 12, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 950,000 kilometers (590,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 93 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