PIA18186: Prometheus Popping
 Target Name:  Prometheus
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle
 Product Size:  700 x 700 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA18186.tif (490.7 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA18186.jpg (20.95 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Saturn's potato-shaped moon Prometheus is shown in this close-up from Cassini.

This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across). North on Prometheus is up and rotated 47 degrees to the right. The end of Prometheus on the lower right points toward Saturn, and the end on the upper left points away from the planet.

The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 26, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 57,000 kilometers (35,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees. Image scale is 339 meters (1,112 feet) 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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2010-02-19