As the Cassini spacecraft sped away from Enceladus following its close
August 2008 flyby, the moon's wrinkled south polar region remained in
view.
The blue-green hues so apparent in false color views like PIA11112
(obtained three hours before this image) are absent in natural-color views
like this one, which approximate the scene as it might appear to human
eyes. In visible light, the surface of Enceladus is almost perfectly
white, and is, in fact, one of the most reflective objects in the Solar
System.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this view. The images were digitally reprojected onto a computer
model of Enceladus, and aligned there, in order to account for the
spacecraft's rapid motion with respect to the moon.
The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera
on Aug. 12, 2008 at a distance of approximately 201,000 kilometers
(125,000 miles) from Enceladus. Image scale at maximum resolution is 1
kilometer (0.6 mile) 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.
