During its very close flyby on March 9, 2005, the Cassini spacecraft
captured this false-color view of Saturn's moon Enceladus, which shows
the wide variety of this icy moon's geology.
Some geological regions on Enceladus are old and retain large numbers of
impact craters; younger areas exhibit many generations of tectonic troughs
and ridges. Subtle differences in color may indicate different ice
properties, such as grain sizes, that will help unravel the sequence of
geologic events leading to the current strange landscape.
This false-color view is a composite of individual frames obtained using
filters sensitive to green (centered at 568 nanometers) and infrared light
(two infrared filters, centered at 752 and 930 nanometers respectively).
The view has been processed to accentuate subtle color differences. The
atmosphere of Saturn forms the background of this scene (its color has
been rendered grey to allow the moon to stand out).
The Sun illuminates Enceladus from the left, leaving part of it in shadow
and blocking out part of the view of Saturn. This view shows the
anti-Saturn hemisphere, centered nearly on the equator.
The images comprising this view were taken with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 94,000 kilometers
(58,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 48 degrees. Resolution in the image is about 560 meters (1,800
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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
