Saturn's moon Daphnis creates waves of disturbance in the Keeler Gap in
this image of the wide A ring and narrow F ring.
Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is a small point of light in the
center of this image which shows the moon's gravity creating perturbations
in the material at the edges of the narrow Keeler gap. (See PIA07809 for a
higher-resolution image of this process.) Background stars appear as
bright specks in the wider Encke Gap of the A ring near the bottom of the
image, and elsewhere in the image.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 60
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 30, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000
miles) from Daphnis and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 69
degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.