From A to F

Signs of activity on both sides of the Roche Division
October 15, 2008
PIA NumberPIA10491
Language
  • english

The Cassini spacecraft captures signs of activity on both sides of the Roche Division -- the region between Saturn's A and F rings.

At right, the small moon Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) makes waves in the edges of the narrow Keeler Gap. At left are several minor kinks in the narrow core of the F ring.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 18 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 31, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (735,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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