A target of intense interest to Cassini mission scientists is Enceladus,
whose wrinkled and frozen crescent is seen here with Saturn's rings. The
planet's dark shadow bisects the ringscape.
The illuminated terrain seen here is on the moon's trailing hemisphere.
North on Enceladus is up and rotated 20 degrees to the left. Enceladus is
505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini narrow-angle
camera on Oct. 13, 2005 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million
kilometers (700,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 106 degrees. The image scale
is 7 kilometers (4 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.