The A and F rings are alive with moving structures in this Cassini
spacecraft view. Graceful drapes of ring material created by Prometheus
are seen sliding by at left, while clumpy ringlets slip through the Encke
Gap.
Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is all but invisible to
the right of the lowest streamer seen here.
This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 12 degrees
above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 7, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.9
million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 163 degrees. Image scale is 11
kilometers (7 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.