Ring Herders

Both of Saturn's F-ring shepherd moons are seen in this Cassini spacecraft view, which also features narrow ringlets in the Encke gap at left.

Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is captured in the act of creating another dark gore in the F ring's inner edge. Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) is farther around the ring's outer edge at top.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 5 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 6, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on both moons.

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