Saturn's moon Enceladus looks tranquil here, concealing the true nature of
this active moon.
To learn about the icy plumes jetting from Enceladus' south polar region,
see PIA10502 and PIA08386.
Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Enceladus (504
kilometers, or 313 miles across). North on Enceladus is up. The image was
taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
May 10, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 766,000
kilometers (476,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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 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..