Looking down onto the northern hemisphere of geologically complex
Enceladus, the Cassini spacecraft spies softened, or "relaxed," craters
and east-west trending fractures and faults.
The anti-Saturn hemisphere of Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles
across) is lit here.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 12, 2006 at a distance of approximately
521,000 kilometers (324,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. Image scale is
3 kilometers (2 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.
