For Enceladus, wrinkles mean the opposite of old age. This view of a
crescent Enceladus shows a transition zone between a wrinkled and
presumably younger region of terrain and an older, more heavily cratered
region. The moon's geologically active southern polar region is seen at
bottom.
The lit terrain shown here is on the side of Enceladus (505 kilometers,
or 314 miles across) that faces away from Saturn. North is up and rotated
20 degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 24, 2005 at a distance of approximately
108,000 kilometers (67,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 102 degrees. Image scale is
646 meters (2,118 feet) 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
