Hints of the curving linear grooves that crisscross bright, icy Enceladus
are just discernible in this image captured by the Cassini spacecraft.
Enceladus is almost entirely composed of water ice and has a surface as
bright as snow. Its diameter is 499 kilometers (310 miles).
This view shows principally the leading hemisphere of Enceladus. The
image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle
camera on Nov. 1, 2004, at a distance of 1.8 million kilometers (1.1
million miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 108 degrees. North is up. The image scale is about 11 kilometers
(7 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and
contrast enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.
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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.