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Making Waves

Dec. 8, 2008
The moons Pan (near center) and Daphnis cruise through the Encke and Keeler gaps, respectively. The edge waves used to discover Daphnis can be seen in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft as the brightening on either side of the moon.

The moons Pan (near center) and Daphnis (lower center) cruise through the Encke and Keeler gaps, respectively.

The edge waves used to discover Daphnis can be seen here as the brightening on either side of the moon. And although the edge waves Pan raises in the Encke gap are not visible here, the wakes caused by Pan's disturbance of the rings are clearly visible.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 20, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.195 million kilometers (742,000 miles) from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. 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.

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