With its excess warmth, water ice jets and huge vapor plume laced with
simple organic materials, Enceladus is an important part of the quest to
understand environments compatible with the chemistry of life as we know
it. The sulci, or "tiger stripe" fractures, in the south polar region are
visible at bottom -- the view here is parallel to the direction of the
sulci.
The view looks toward the anti-Saturn hemisphere on the moon's trailing
side. North on Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) is towards
the top of the image.
This false-color view is a composite of individual frames obtained using
filters sensitive to ultraviolet (centered at 338 nanometers), green
(centered at 568 nanometers) and infrared light (centered at 1002
nanometers). The broad range of wavelengths exaggerates subtle color
variations across the moon's surface.
The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera
on May 11, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately
739,000 kilometers (459,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 36 degrees. Image scale is 4
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.