The plumes of Enceladus continue to gush icy particles into Saturn orbit,
making this little moon one of a select group of geologically active
bodies in the solar system.
Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) is seen here against the
night side of Saturn. The extended exposure time used to image the plumes
also makes the southern hemisphere, illuminated by ring-shine, appear
bright.
The image was acquired in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 4, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.1
million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Enceladus and 2.3 million
kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image was taken at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 159 degrees. Image scale is
13 kilometers (8 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging
team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.