Saturn’s shepherd moon Prometheus hovers between the A and F rings. Image credit; NASA/JPL/SSI. Click to enlarge
Saturn’s shepherd moon Prometheus hovers between the A and F rings as if suspended on an invisible thread, while bright clouds drift in Saturn’s atmosphere approximately 130,000 kilometers (81,000 miles) beyond. It is noteworthy that such clouds are visible here in the shadows cast by the rings. Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel. This view was processed to enhance fine details.
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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, 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.
Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release
Astronomers have only been aware of fast radio bursts for about two decades. These are…
How do you weigh one of the largest objects in the entire universe? Very carefully,…
Exploring the Moon poses significant risks, with its extreme environment and hazardous terrain presenting numerous…
Volcanoes are not restricted to the land, there are many undersea versions. One such undersea…
Some binary stars are unusual. They contain a main sequence star like our Sun, while…
11 million years ago, Mars was a frigid, dry, dead world, just like it is…