A false color look reveals subtle details on Enceladus that are not
visible in natural color views.
The now-familiar bluish appearance (in false color views) of the southern
"tiger stripe" features and other relatively youthful fractures is almost
certainly attributable to larger grain sizes of relatively pure ice,
compared to most surface materials.
On the "tiger stripes," this coarse-grained ice is seen in the colored
deposits flanking the fractures as well as inside the fractures. On older
fractures on other areas of Enceladus, the blue ice mostly occurs on the
exposed wall scarps.
The color difference across the moon's surface (a subtle gradation from
upper left to lower right) could indicate broad-scale compositional
differences across the moon's surface. It is also possible that the
gradation in color is due to differences in the way the brightness of
Enceladus changes toward the limb, a characteristic which is highly
dependent on wavelength and viewing geometry.
See PIA07709 for a monochrome version of this view.
Terrain on the trailing hemisphere of Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314
miles across) is seen here. North is up.
The view was created by combining images taken using ultraviolet, green
and infrared spectral filters, and then was processed to accentuate subtle
color differences. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2006 at a distance of approximately
153,000 kilometers (95,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Image scale is
912 meters (2,994 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage
is at http://ciclops.org.