Few large craters are to be found in the wrinkled terrain of Enceladus,
where the surface has been reworked by geologic processes presumably
resulting from the moon's inner warmth.
Cassini spied the bright crescent of Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314
miles across) on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately 628,000
kilometers (391,000 miles). The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 103 degrees. Image scale is 4 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.