Two of Saturn's moons, Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) and Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across), are seen here shepherding the planet's narrow F-ring. Prometheus overtakes Pandora in orbit around Saturn about every 25 days. Slightly above the pair and to the right is another moon, Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across). The image was taken with the narrow angle camera on the Cassini spacecraft on May 1, 2004, at a distance of 31.4 million kilometers (19.5 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 187 kilometers (116 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified and greatly contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, 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.
|Target||Saturn||Epimetheus, F Ring, Pandora, Prometheus, Saturn Rings|
|Target Type||Planet||Ring, Satellite|
|Instrument Host||Cassini Orbiter|
|Instrument||Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)|
|Detector||Narrow Angle Camera|
|Date in Caption||2004-05-01|
|Image Credit||NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute|