The moon Enceladus seems to hover above the outer reaches of Saturn's B
ring. Below and to the right of Enceladus, four faint bands lie in the
center of the dark Cassini Division.
Recently, scientists have speculated that the particles that make up the
dense B and A rings might be more like fluffy snowballs than hard ice
cubes. The conclusion is based on temperature data obtained by the Cassini
spacecraft.
Enceladus' diameter is 505 kilometers (314 miles). The icy moon is on the
near side of the rings in this view.
This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 15, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.3
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Enceladus. The image scale is
14 kilometers (9 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.