Saturn's moon Daphnis gives a scalloped look to the edge of the A ring as
the moon orbits within the Keeler Gap.
Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is the bright spot in the narrow
gap near the center of the image. Since the gap is not much larger than
the moon, the small moon's gravity is great enough to perturb the
particles in the ring and create the wavelike patterns seen here. See
PIA09850 to learn more.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 61
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 30, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (932,000
miles) from Daphnis and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 73
degrees. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.