CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Boosting the Signal

The ice jets of Enceladus send particles streaming into space hundreds of kilometers above the south pole of this spectacularly active moon. Some of the particles escape to form the diffuse E ring around Saturn.

This color-coded image was processed to enhance faint signals, making the contours and extent of the fainter, larger-scale component of the plume easier to see.

The bright strip behind and above Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) is the E ring, in which this intriguing body resides. The small round object at far left is a background star.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 24, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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: July 21, 2006 (PIA 08226)
Image/Caption Information 		  Boosting the Signal
PIA 08226
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