Rough Around the Edges

This detailed look at Saturn's A ring captures Daphnis in the narrow Keeler Gap. The small moon creates complex wave patterns in the gap edges that Cassini scientists are working to understand.

To the right of the Keeler Gap, the outer A-ring edge is significantly brighter than the rest of the ring.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 32 degrees above the ringplane. Daphnis is 8 kilometers (5 miles) wide.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 31, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (629,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 6 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