Daphnis leaves a path of disturbance on either side of her as she moves in
her orbit within the Keeler Gap.
The gravity of the small moon (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is enough
to carve wavelike perturbations into the material of the outer A ring. The
bright object to the right of the rings is a star, not a moon.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 59
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 31, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 856,000 kilometers (532,000 miles)
from Daphnis and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63
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.