Two Sculptors

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Caption:

Although difficult to see at first, more than one moon is at work sculpting Saturn's rings in this view from the Cassini spacecraft.

Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) is more or less obvious just inside the perturbed F ring. But in the Keeler Gap, just inside the bright A ring edge, lurks Daphnis (7 kilometers, or 4.3 miles across). The tiny moon and its attendant waves in the gap edges create a slight brightening of the gap at center.

This image is a wide-angle view taken concurrently with the higher resolution view seen in PIA07809 .

This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 17 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2006 at a distance of approximately 422,000 kilometers (262,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale on the sky at the distance of Saturn is 22 kilometers (13 miles) per pixel.

Background Info:

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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