CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Wrinkled Crescent

Wrinkled Crescent
PIA 07641
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   A target of intense interest to Cassini mission scientists is Enceladus, whose wrinkled and frozen crescent is seen here with Saturn's rings. The planet's dark shadow bisects the ringscape.

The illuminated terrain seen here is on the moon's trailing hemisphere. North on Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) is up and rotated 20 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2005 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 106 degrees. The image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: November 29, 2005 (PIA 07641)
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