Saturn's two ring-embedded moons are pictured here, along with clearly
visible signs of their perturbing effects on the ring edges that border
the gaps they inhabit.
These ripples along the ring edges arise when the perturbing moon passes
by, creating leading wakes in the faster moving ring material interior to
the moon and trailing wakes as it passes the slower moving ring material
beyond the moon. Being larger than Daphnis, Pan creates correspondingly
larger wakes.
Daphnis (7 kilometers, or 4.3 miles across) is seen in the Keeler Gap at
left, and Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) appears near center in
the Encke Gap.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 10
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 1, 2007. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (819,000
miles) from Saturn. 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
