The Cassini spacecraft has revealed a never-before-seen level of detail in
Saturn's F ring, including evidence for the perturbing effect of small
moonlets orbiting in or close to the ring's bright core.
For some time, scientists have suspected the presence of tiny moonlets
that orbit Saturn in association with the clumpy ring. As the small satellites
move close to the F ring core they leave a gravitational signature. In some
cases they can draw out material in the form of a "streamer"—a miniature
version of the interaction Cassini has witnessed between Prometheus and the
F ring material. The dynamics of this interaction are the same, but the scale is
different. See PIA06143 for a view of Prometheus
creating a streamer.
Scientists speculate that there could be several small moons with a variety
of sizes involved in the creation of structures like the one seen here.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately
255,000 kilometers (159,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Scale in the
original image was 1 kilometer (3,873 feet) per pixel. The image has been
magnified by a factor of two and contrast enhanced.
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
