The plumes of water and other ice vapors jetting from the surface of Enceladus
are one of the most exciting astronomical discoveries of the 21st century. These
plumes originate from long linear fractures near the south pole of Enceladus. New
topographic maps give us a fresh unprecedented look at this geologically young
and active region. This perspective view shows several of these “tiger stripes” from
which the plumes are venting. The stripes themselves consist of deep grooves
flanked by two elevated ridges. The south polar terrains generally are also heavily
fractured and deformed. These new topographic maps, constructed from stereo
and shape-from-shading techniques by Dr. Paul Schenk (http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lpi/schenk/) at the Lunar and
Planetary Institute, show that the stripes do not have a lot of relief. The flanking
ridges are typically 75 to 200 meters high while the grooves in between the ridges
are 150 to 300 meters deep. Intensely deformed ridges along the edge of the south
polar terrains (lower right) have relief of up to 1 kilometer or so. Vertical relief has
been exaggerated by a factor of 20 in this view to aid interpretation.
The raw data from which this product was developed were retrieved from the
Planetary Data System's Cassini archives. 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. (http://ciclops.org)
