Click on the image for the movie
The little moon Daphnis and its entourage of waves on the edge of the
Keeler gap in Saturn's rings cast long shadows in this movie created from
images taken as the planet approaches its mid-August 2009 equinox.
This movie is a sequence of 10 images, each taken about one minute 30
seconds apart. The small moon Daphnis (8 kilometers or 5 miles across)
occupies an inclined orbit within the 42-kilometer (26-mile) wide Keeler
Gap in Saturn's outer A ring. Recent analyses by imaging scientists
published in the Astronomical Journal illustrate how the moon's
gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the particles forming the gap's
edge and sculpts the edge into waves having both horizontal (radial) and
out-of-plane components.
Measurements of the shadows in this and other images indicate that the
vertical structures range between one-half to 1.5 kilometers tall (about
one-third to one mile), making them as much as 150 times as high as the
ring is thick. The main A, B and C rings are only about 10 meters (about
30 feet) thick. Daphnis itself can be seen casting a shadow onto the
nearby ring.
These images of shadows cast onto the rings and others like it (see
PIA11656 and PIA11653) are only possible around the time of Saturn's
equinox which occurs every half-Saturn-year (equivalent to about 15 Earth
years). The illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the
sun's angle to the ringplane and causes out-of-plane structures to cast
long shadows across the rings.
Bright specks in some movie frames are stars in the background.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 25 degrees
below the ringplane. The images were taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 25, 2009. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 768,000 kilometers (477,000 miles)
from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees.
Image scale is 4 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.