PIA11504: Gravity-Induced Undulations
Target Name: Daphnis
Is a satellite of: Saturn
Mission: Cassini-Huygens
Spacecraft: Cassini Orbiter
Instrument: Imaging Science Subsystem - Narrow Angle
Product Size: 1014 samples x 1014 lines
Produced By: Cassini Imaging Team
Full-Res TIFF: PIA11504.tif (1.029 MB)
Full-Res JPEG: PIA11504.jpg (89.93 kB)

Click on the image to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly cropped or reduced in size from original).

Original Caption Released with Image:

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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2009-06-01