Ring Disrupted

In this image of the F ring, taken shortly after its ring particles encountered the shepherd moon Prometheus, the disruption to the ring caused by the moon is evident.

The bright core of the ring and its neighboring faint strands show kinks where the moon's gravity has altered the orbits of the ring particles.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 23, 2008 at a distance of approximately 444,000 kilometers (276,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 88 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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