A Ring Waves

This Cassini spacecraft view shows details of Saturn's outer A ring, including the Encke and Keeler gaps. The A ring brightens substantially outside the Keeler Gap.

On both sides of the broad Encke gap are bright spiral density waves. See Spiral Density Waves for comparison.

This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 52 degrees below the ringplane.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired on Feb. 19, 2007 at a distance of approximately 950,000 kilometers (590,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute