This close-up view of Saturn's moon Enceladus looks toward the moon's
terminator (the transition from day to night) and shows a distinctive
pattern of continuous, ridged, slightly curved and roughly parallel
faults within the moon's southern polar latitudes. These surface features
have been informally referred to by imaging scientists as "tiger stripes"
due to their distinctly stripe-like appearance when viewed in false color
(see PIA06249).
Illumination of the scene is from the lower left. The image was obtained
in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July
14, 2005, at a distance of about 20,720 kilometers (12,880 miles) from
Enceladus, and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46
degrees. The image scale is 122 meters (400 feet) per pixel. The image's
contrast has been enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.
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.
