The active surface jets on Enceladus collectively form a brilliant,
extended plume that is made visible as sunlight scatters among the
microscopic particles of ice. The plume is more easily seen with the Sun
directly, or almost directly, behind Enceladus, as is the case here.
The moon's surface is lit here by reflected light from Saturn. A faint
spike of stray light from the sunlit crescent visible in PIA10498
appears just right of the moon. This image was taken as part of the same
observation as PIA10498, but uses a much longer exposure, making both the
plume and Saturn-lit surface easier to see.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 17, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 235,000 kilometers (146,000 miles) from Enceladus and at
a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 140 degrees. Image scale is
1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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.
