This Cassini image of Saturn's moon Enceladus shows a region containing
bizarre, wrinkled terrain. Enceladus is covered with bright water ice.
The part of its surface visible here appears to be largely free of
craters - indicating that it is geologically young.
The first close imaging of this moon will be done by Cassini in February
2005 and should reveal many surprises. Enceladus has a diameter of 499
kilometers (310 miles).
This view shows primarily the leading hemisphere of Enceladus. The image
has been rotated so that north on Enceladus is up.
The image was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
Jan. 15, 2005, at a distance of approximately 367,000 kilometers (228,000
miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 74 degrees. A combination of spectral filters sensitive to infrared
and polarized light was used to obtain this view. Resolution in the
original image was about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) per pixel. The image
has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid
visibility.
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.
