The leading hemisphere of Enceladus displays a remarkably fresh-looking
surface in this recent Cassini view. At this resolution, only a few
craters can be made out in this wrinkled region of the geologically active
moon's surface. A far more heavily cratered, and older, terrain region is
visible to the northwest.
This view is centered on 15 degrees north latitude, 109 degrees west
longitude. North on Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 30, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 108,000 kilometers (67,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a
Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. Image scale is
646 meters (2,119 feet) 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
