Daphnis drifts through the Keeler gap, at the center of its entourage of
waves.
The little moon (7 kilometers, or 4.3 miles across) draws material in the
Keeler gap (42 kilometers, or 26 miles wide) into these now familiar edge
waves as it orbits Saturn.
This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 25 degrees
below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 27, 2006 at a distance of approximately
325,000 kilometers (202,000 miles) from Daphnis and at a
Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 36 degrees. 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.