Image of the Day: Cassini catches moon making waves

Image of the Day: Cassini catches moon making waves

July 30, 2012

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

The Cassini spacecraft catches Saturn’s moon Daphnis making waves and casting shadows from the narrow Keeler Gap of the planet’s A ring in this view taken around the time of Saturn’s August 2009 equinox.

Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is almost invisible in this view, but the shadows cast on the wide A ring can be seen below the center of the image. The Enke Gap of the A ring, which is wider than the Keeler Gap, is on the right. Saturn’s thin F ring is on the left of the view. See PIA11629 for a similar, closer view.

More than a dozen background stars are visible in this image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 16, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 108 degrees. Image scale is 12 kilometers (8 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, CO, USA.