Interesting geological details on Enceladus can be seen in
modest-resolution Cassini spacecraft views like this one. At bottom is the
wrinkled and generally crater-free terrain near the moon's south pole,
which contains the actively venting "tiger stripe" fractures.
Multiple funnel-shaped tectonic patterns are visible above (north of) the
polar region; in higher resolution Cassini images these are seen to be
folded regions of ridges and troughs (see PIA06191). North of these
features are long, north-south trending fractures.
The view looks toward the southern hemisphere on the trailing side of
Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across).The image was taken in
visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May
26, 2008 at a distance of approximately 516,000 kilometers (320,000 miles)
from Enceladus. Image scale 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.
