Shadows and Gores

Prometheus is caught here casting a shadow on the F ring. To the right, the F ring also shows a gore where Prometheus recently entered into the ring, scattering material out of its way.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 29, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.167 million kilometers (725,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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