Prometheus emerges from Saturn's shadow in this image taken of the dark
side of the rings.
Since it is nearing the equinox at Saturn, the Sun is very nearly in the
ring plane, causing Prometheus to cast its own diminutive shadow on the F
ring next to Saturn's enormous one.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 29, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.24
million kilometers (771,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a
Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27 degrees. Image scale is 7
kilometers (5 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.