As it swooped past the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus on July 14,
2005, Cassini acquired high resolution views of this puzzling ice world.
From afar, Enceladus exhibits a bizarre mixture of softened craters and
complex, fractured terrains.
This large mosaic of 21 narrow-angle camera images have been arranged to
provide a full-disk view of the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Enceladus. This
mosaic is a false-color view that includes images taken at wavelengths
from the ultraviolet to the infrared portion of the spectrum, and is
similar to another, lower resolution false-color view obtained during the
flyby (see PIA06249). In false-color, many
long fractures on Enceladus exhibit a pronounced difference in color
(represented here in blue) from the surrounding terrain.
A leading explanation for the difference in color is that the walls of
the fractures expose outcrops of coarse-grained ice that are free of the
powdery surface materials that mantle flat-lying surfaces.
The original images in the false-color mosaic range in resolution from
350 to 67 meters (1,148 to 220 feet) per pixel and were taken at distances
ranging from 61,300 to 11,100 kilometers (38,090 to 6,897 miles) from
Enceladus. The mosaic is also part of a movie sequence of images from this
flyby (see PIA06253).
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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.