Fingerprints of the Moons

The Encke and Keeler gaps are visible in this image of the outer A ring. Brightness variations are clearly visible in the Encke ringlet.

A density wave can be seen exterior to (to the left of) the Encke gap, and the region exterior to (to the left of) the Keeler gap is considerably brighter than the rest of the ring.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 23, 2008 at a distance of approximately 721,000 kilometers (448,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 58 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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