Plumes of icy material extend above the southern polar region of Saturn's
moon Enceladus as imaged by the Cassini spacecraft in February 2005. The
monochrome view is presented along with a color-coded version on the
right. The latter reveals a fainter and much more extended plume
component.
Images like these are being analyzed by scientists as they seek to
explain the processes that could be producing such incredible features.
As reported in the journal Science on March 10, 2006, imaging scientists
believe that the plumes are geysers erupting from pressurized subsurface
reservoirs of liquid water above 273 degrees Kelvin (0 degrees Celsius).
Another plume view, PIA07801, was taken
one month earlier and looks broadside at the moon's prominent "tiger
stripe" fractures. In the January view, the plume appears to have a
single component. This (February) view looks along the tiger stripe
fractures and reveals both a large and a small component to the plume;
the smaller, fainter component is separated from the main plume by about
100 kilometers (60 miles).
See PIA06247 for a view of the tiger stripe features.
This clear-filter image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle
camera at a distance of approximately 321,000 kilometers (199,000 miles)
from Enceladus at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 153
degrees. The image scale is approximately 1.8 kilometers (1.1 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
