Across the expanse of Saturn's rings, the Cassini spacecraft spies two
small moons in consort.
Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across) is seen exterior to the bright
outer edge of the A ring. Daphnis (7 kilometers, or 4.3 miles across),
below Atlas in this view, orbits Saturn within the narrow Keeler Gap. The
presence of Daphnis is revealed by the waves it raises in the ring
material surrounding it on the edges of the gap. Daphnis and its waves
moved between exposures taken to create this color view, resulting in
their slight displacement in each color.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 18
degrees above the ringplane. Bright clumps are visible in the narrow F
ring.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 13, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Atlas. Image
scale is 11 kilometers (7 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
