Quick Time Movie of Cassini swooping past Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus
As it swooped past the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus on July 14,
2005, Cassini acquired increasingly high-resolution views of this puzzling
ice world. These views have been combined into this exciting movie
sequence. The movie provides a stunning, up-close look at what is surely
one of the youngest surfaces in the Saturn system.
From afar, Enceladus exhibits a bizarre mixture of softened craters and
complex, fractured terrains. The movie zooms in on the southern polar
terrains and closes in on one of the tectonic stripes that characterize
this region which is essentially free of sizeable impact scars.
The bright oblong area seen during the zoom is an intermediate resolution
image from near the time of closest approach that has been melded into the
lower resolution mosaic, and artificially brightened.
The movie ends on the highest resolution image acquired by Cassini which
reveals a surface dominated by ice blocks between 10 and 100 meters (33
and 330 feet) across, lying in a region that is unusual in its lack of the
very fine-grained frost that seems to cover the rest of Enceladus.
The lack of frost and the absence of craters are indicators of a youthful
surface.
The initial image in the movie is a large mosaic of 21 narrow-angle camera
images that have been arranged to provide a full-disk view of the
anti-Saturn hemisphere on Enceladus. This mosaic is a false-color view
that includes images taken at wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the
infrared portion of the spectrum, and is similar to another, lower
resolution false-color view obtained during the flyby (see PIA06249).
In false-color, many long fractures on Enceladus exhibit a pronounced
difference in color (represented here in blue) from the surrounding
terrain.
A leading explanation for the difference in color is that the walls of the
fractures expose outcrops of coarse-grained ice that are free of the
powdery surface materials that mantle flat-lying surfaces.
The original images in the false-color mosaic range in resolution from
350 to 67 meters (1,148 to 220 feet) per pixel and were taken from
distances ranging from 61,300 to 11,100 kilometers (38,090 to 6,897 miles)
from Enceladus. The mosaic is also available separately (see PIA06254).
Image scale is about 37 meters (121 feet) per pixel in the wide-angle
camera image and about 4 meters (13 feet) per pixel in the narrow-angle
image (see PIA06250 for these images). Both of these ultra-high resolution
views were acquired from an altitude of approximately 208 kilometers (129
miles) above Enceladus as the spacecraft near the time of closest approach
during the flyby.
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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
