Enceladus blasts its icy spray into space in this unlit-side ring view
that also features a tiny sliver of Rhea.
The south polar region of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across)
peeks out from beneath the rings to the right of Enceladus (505
kilometers, or 314 miles across).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9
million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Enceladus and 4.6 million
kilometers (2.9 million miles) from Rhea. The Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft,
or phase, angle is 161 degrees. Image scale is 23 kilometers (14 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.
