Disturbances by Daphnis

Daphnis cruises through the Keeler Gap, raising edge waves in the ring material as it passes.

As is characteristic of waves raised by a moon on the edges of a very narrow gap like Keeler, the wave begins as a coherent form near Daphnis and becomes less so with increasing orbital distance from the moon.
Daphnis is 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) across.

This view looks upon the lit side of the rings from about 31 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately 768,000 kilometers (477,000 miles) from Daphnis. 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