This detailed look at Saturn's A ring captures Daphnis in the narrow
Keeler Gap. The small moon creates complex wave patterns in the gap edges
that Cassini scientists are working to understand.
To the right of the Keeler Gap, the outer A-ring edge is significantly
brighter than the rest of the ring.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 32
degrees above the ringplane. Daphnis is 8 kilometers (5 miles) wide.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 31, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1 million kilometers (629,000 miles) from Saturn. Image
scale is 6 kilometers (4 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.
