Although difficult to see at first, more than one moon is at work
sculpting Saturn's rings in this view from the Cassini spacecraft.
Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is more or less obvious
just inside the perturbed F ring. But in the Keeler Gap, just inside the bright
A ring edge, lurks Daphnis (7 kilometers, or 4.3 miles across). The tiny
moon and its attendant waves in the gap edges create a slight brightening
of the gap at center.
This image is a wide-angle view taken concurrently with the higher resolution view seen in PIA07809.
This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 17 degrees
below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2006 at a distance of approximately 422,000
kilometers (262,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale on the sky at the
distance of Saturn is 22 kilometers (13 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.
