Undulations mark both sides of the path of Saturn's moon Daphnis through
the A ring.
Daphnis may be small at only 8 kilometers (5 miles) across, but the moon's
gravity is great enough, and the Keeler gap in which it resides is narrow
enough, so that the perturbed particles create the wavelike patterns seen
here.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 47
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 21, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000
miles) from Daphnis and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50
degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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.