NASA Cassini Image of Enceladus: The New South

The Cassini spacecraft takes a close view of some of the southern terrain of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, where newly created terrain is on display.

See New to Old on Enceladus for a mosaic of this geologically active moon’s leading hemisphere that shows the more recently created terrain of the south polar region meeting older, crater-filled terrain farther north. The area shown here is between the leading hemisphere and Saturn-facing side of Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across). This view is centered on terrain at 35 degrees south latitude, 45 degrees west longitude. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 13, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees. Image scale is 830 feet (253 meters) 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 . Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute Full-Res: PIA14578