Mimas and the Shepherds

Prometheus, Pandora, Mimas and the F ring
July 27, 2007
PIA NumberPIA08993
Language
  • english

The shepherd moons Prometheus and Pandora drive the quirky F ring in its circuit of Saturn, while Mimas lurks in the distance.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 22 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 23, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 106 kilometers (66 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