Streaming Away

Saturn's moon Prometheus pulls away from an encounter with the narrow F ring, trailing a streamer of fine, icy particles behind it.

See Soft Collision for a movie of Prometheus creating a streamer in the F ring.

Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across at its widest point) is lit by the Sun from lower right. Dim, reflected light from Saturn illuminates the moon from the top. Some hints of topography can be seen on the Saturn-lit side. The F-ring streamer is seen at left.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 67 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 25, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 534,000 kilometers (332,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 92 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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