Wrinkled and cracked Enceladus hangs in the distance as the pitted ring
moon Janus, at right, rounds the outer edge of the F ring.
Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) is remarkable for its
actively venting south polar region, while Janus (181 kilometers, or 113
miles across) is known for its orbital swap with the moon Epimetheus.
The bright core of the F ring is perhaps 50 kilometers wide and contains
numerous clumps and kinks. Dimmer, flanking ringlets on either side of the
core wind into a tight spiral structure, discovered in Cassini images.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 21, 2006 at a distance of approximately
565,000 kilometers (351,000 miles) from Janus, 702,000 kilometers
(436,000 miles) from Enceladus and 530,000 kilometers (329,000 miles)
from Saturn. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel on Janus and
4 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel on Enceladus.
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.
