Daphnis cruises through the Keeler Gap, raising edge waves in the ring
material as it passes.
As is characteristic of waves raised by a moon on the edges of a very
narrow gap like Keeler, the wave begins as a coherent form near Daphnis
and becomes less so with increasing orbital distance from the moon.
Daphnis is 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) across.
This view looks upon the lit side of the rings from about 31 degrees below
the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately
768,000 kilometers (477,000 miles) from Daphnis. Image scale is 5
kilometers (3 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.