Which small moon maintains Saturn's Keeler Gap?

Daphnis is the small moon that maintains Saturn’s Keeler Gap.

Daphnis orbits inside the Keeler Gap, a narrow opening in Saturn’s outer A ring. Its gravity helps clear and shape the gap, while also producing waves and ripples along the nearby ring edges. For this reason, Daphnis is known as a shepherd moon, although its role is especially associated with the Keeler Gap.

The moon was discovered in images from the Cassini spacecraft in 2005 and was initially given the provisional designation S/2005 S 1. It is only about 7.8 kilometers across, making it tiny compared with Saturn’s large moons such as Titan, Rhea and Iapetus.

Daphnis is sometimes confused with Pan, which maintains the nearby Encke Gap, farther inward in Saturn’s A ring. Prometheus and Atlas also influence ring material, but neither is the moon embedded in the Keeler Gap. Daphnis’s inclined orbit creates distinctive vertical structures in the otherwise extremely flat ring plane.