As the Cassini spacecraft began its August 2008 flyby of Enceladus, the
spacecraft approached over the moon's cratered north pole. Cassini
acquired this view as the icy moon grew ever larger in its field of view.
In addition to the sunlit crescent at upper right, the faint glow at
bottom indicates a secondary source of illumination: reflected sunlight
from Saturn.
The view looks toward high northern latitudes on Enceladus (504
kilometers, or 313 miles across) from a perspective 71 degrees north of
the moon's equator. The north pole is in shadow at center.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 11, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 448,000 kilometers (278,000 miles) from Enceladus and at
a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 113 degrees. Image scale at
maximum resolution is 3 kilometers (2 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.