An enhanced close-up view shows at least two distinct jets spraying a mist
of fine particles from the south polar region of Enceladus. The particles
in the plume scatter sunlight most effectively at high
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft angles, or phase angles, making the plumes
appear bright.
This image shows the night side of Saturn and the active moon against
dark sky. Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
Some artifacts due to image compression and cosmic rays striking the
camera's detector remain as noise in the image.
The image was acquired in polarized green light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 4, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Enceladus
and 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn. The image was
taken at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 159 degrees. Image
scale is 13 kilometers (8 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.
