CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Softly Glowing Scene

Softly Glowing Scene
PIA 08217
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   Enceladus blasts its icy spray into space in this unlit-side ring view that also features a tiny sliver of Rhea.

The south polar region of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) peeks out from beneath the rings to the right of Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Enceladus and 4.6 million kilometers (2.9 million miles) from Rhea. The Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle is 161 degrees. Image scale is 23 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Enceladus.

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: July 10, 2006 (PIA 08217)
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