Plumes of icy material extend above the southern polar region of Saturn's
moon Enceladus, as imaged by the Cassini spacecraft in January 2005. The
monochrome view is presented along with a color-coded image on the right.
The view in this image is perpendicular to the tiger stripe fractures that
straddle the south pole. Another plume view, PIA07798, was taken one month
later and looks along the tiger stripe fractures. See PIA06247 for a view
of the tiger stripe features.
Images like these are being analyzed by scientists as they seek to explain
the processes that could be producing such incredible features. As
reported in the journal Science on March 10, 2006, imaging scientists
believe that the plumes are geysers erupting from pressurized subsurface
reservoirs of liquid water above 273 degrees Kelvin (0 degrees Celsius).
These images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at
a distance of approximately 209,400 kilometers (130,100 miles) from
Enceladus at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 148 degrees.
The image scale is about 1.3 kilometer (0.8 mile) per pixel.
A slightly different version of this image product was released in Nov.
2005. See PIA07760.
The mosaic is an orthographic projection centered at 46.8 degrees south
latitude, 188 degrees west longitude, and has an image scale of 67 meters
(220 feet) per pixel. The original images ranged in resolution from 67
meters per pixel to 350 meters (1,150 feet) per pixel and were taken at
distances ranging from 11,100 to 61,300 kilometers (6,900 to miles) from
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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
