The ice jets of Enceladus send particles streaming into space hundreds of
kilometers above the south pole of this spectacularly active moon. Some of
the particles escape to form the diffuse E ring around Saturn.
This color-coded image was processed to enhance faint signals, making the
contours and extent of the fainter, larger-scale component of the plume
easier to see.
The bright strip behind and above Enceladus (505 kilometers, 314 miles
across) is the E ring, in which this intriguing body resides. The small
round object at far left is a background star.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 24, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.9
million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is
11 kilometers (7 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.
