The moons Pan (near center) and Daphnis (lower center) cruise through the
Encke and Keeler gaps, respectively.
The edge waves used to discover Daphnis can be seen here as the
brightening on either side of the moon. And although the edge waves Pan
raises in the Encke gap are not visible here, the wakes caused by Pan's
disturbance of the rings are clearly visible.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 20, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.195
million kilometers (742,000 miles) from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 29 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.
