Cassini Image: Scanning Enceladus’ Surface

The Cassini spacecraft surveys the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus in this image, which shows newly created terrain in the upper right meeting older, cratered terrain in the lower left. This view is centered on terrain at 5 degrees south latitude, 200 degrees west longitude. For a closer view of the surface of Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 21, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 14 degrees. Image scale is 148 meters (486 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 in Washington. 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 or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org . Full-Res: PIA12765 Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute