The In-Between Moons

Cassini looks up from beneath the ringplane to spot Prometheus and Atlas orbiting between Saturn's A and F rings.

Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across. Atlas is 20 kilometers (12 miles) across.

The F ring displays its characteristic clumps, while scientists are watching diligently for signs of tiny, embedded moons. Prometheus is responsible for some of the clumpy structure in the F ring.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 28, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is about 13 kilometers (8 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