In Her Wake

Daphnis leaves a path of disturbance on either side of her as she moves in her orbit within the Keeler Gap.

The gravity of the small moon (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is enough to carve wavelike perturbations into the material of the outer A ring. The bright object to the right of the rings is a star, not a moon.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 59 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 31, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 856,000 kilometers (532,000 miles) from Daphnis and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. 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