The Cassini spacecraft captures a view showing two of Saturn's moons and
their gravitational effects on nearby rings.
At top, Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across at its widest point) streaks
through the Keeler Gap, with its ever-present edge waves. At center,
Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across at its widest point) pulls away
from a recent encounter with the F ring. A bright background star is visible
below the F ring.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 41
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2008. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (788,000
miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 53 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.