Ringcraft

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Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft captures a view showing two of Saturn's moons and their gravitational effects on nearby rings.

At top, Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across at its widest point) streaks through the Keeler Gap, with its ever-present edge waves. At center, Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across at its widest point) pulls away from a recent encounter with the F ring. A bright background star is visible below the F ring.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 41 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (788,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 53 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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/ . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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