Saturn's icy moon Enceladus hovers above Saturn's exquisite rings in this
color view from Cassini. The rings, made of nearly pure water ice, have
also become somewhat contaminated by meteoritic dust during their history,
which may span several hundred million years. Enceladus shares the rings'
nearly pure water ice composition, but appears to have eluded dust
contamination through resurfacing processes that scientists are still
trying to understand. Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
Dust affects the rings' color, while differences in brightness are
attributable to varying particle sizes and concentrations.
The images for this natural color view were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 5, 2005, at a distance of
approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn
through red, green and blue spectral filters. The image scale is 13
kilometers (8 miles) 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 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.
