Cassini spies the wrinkled, fractured and remarkably crater-poor terrain
of Enceladus. Scientists are working to understand what causes the moon's
surprising geologic activity (see PIA07759).
North on Enceladus (505 kilometers, 314 miles across) is up and rotated 20
degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 8, 2006 at a distance of approximately
560,000 kilometers (348,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 103 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.