Daphnis, the tiny moon that inhabits the Keeler Gap in the outer edge of
Saturn's A ring, is captured here in remarkable detail with its entourage
of waves.
The edge waves are especially bright in places where ring material piles
up, a characteristic that has been seen in computer simulations of the
interactions between gap-embedded moons and the surrounding ring
particles.
The 7 kilometer-wide (4.3 mile) moon appears to have an unusual shape in
this image. It is not simply a bright dot, but instead exhibits a dimmer
component immediately to its left. Though it is far from certain, this
component may be ring material caught in the act of accreting onto
Daphnis, a process currently being studied by imaging scientists.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2006, at a distance of approximately
422,000 kilometers (262,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 2
kilometers (1 mile) 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.