The Encke gap displays gentle waves in its inner and outer edges that are
caused by gravitational tugs from the small moon Pan. These scalloped
edges were captured in a dramatic image taken by Cassini during its
insertion into Saturn orbit in 2004.
The Encke gap is a 325-kilometer (200-mile) wide division in Saturn's
outer A ring. Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) orbits squarely in
the center of this gap.
The original image was stretched in the horizontal direction by a factor
of four to exaggerate the amplitude of the waves, then reduced to half
size and cropped to focus on the gap.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately
290,000 kilometers (180,000 miles) from Saturn. Scale in the original
image was 1 kilometer (0.6 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.
