Cassini stares toward the night side of Saturn, seen here on the right, as
the active icy moon Enceladus glides past.
The moon's now famous icy plumes spew out of the south polar region (see
PIA07758), providing a fresh supply of material for Saturn's E ring.
Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across. Saturn's shadow stretches
over the rings above the crescent moon.
The image was acquired in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 4, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.1
million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Enceladus and 2.3 million
kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image was taken at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 159 degrees. Image scale is
13 kilometers (8 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.
