A scalloped look is created in the edges of the Keeler Gap in Saturn's
outer A ring as the moon Daphnis orbits in the gap.
Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is the bright spot in the narrow
gap near the center of the image. The small moon's gravity is great
enough, and the Keeler gap in which it resides is narrow enough, to
perturb the particles in the ring and create the wavelike patterns seen
here. See PIA09850 to learn more about this process. As the planet approaches
its mid-August 2009 equinox, Cassini has imaged these vertical structures
casting long shadows across the rings (see PIA11654).
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 58 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 9, 2009. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 847,000 kilometers (526,000 miles) from Daphnis
and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 89 degrees. Image
scale is 5 kilometers (3 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.