Enceladus hangs like a single bright pearl against the golden-brown canvas
of Saturn and its icy rings. Visible on Saturn is the region where
daylight gives way to dusk. Above, the rings throw thin shadows onto the
planet.
Icy Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken using the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 200,000 kilometers (100,000 miles) from Enceladus. The image
scale is 10 kilometers (6 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.