Tiny Daphnis' impact on the Keeler gap in which it resides can be seen in
this image from the Cassini spacecraft.
Daphnis (8 kilometers, or5 miles across) makes waves in the edge of the
Keeler gap as it orbits. PIA09812 shows Daphnis and Pan, another shepherding
moon, creating their perturbations on the rings.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 40
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 11, 2009. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (627,000
miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 44
degrees. Image scale is 6 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.
