CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
A Folded Surface

A Folded Surface
PIA 08280
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   Wrinkled terrain on the trailing hemisphere of Enceladus snakes across this view, separating fresher, younger terrain in the midlatitudes from more ancient, cratered provinces in the high north.

The ridges and troughs seen here are thought to be caused by tectonic stresses across the icy surface of Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across). The view was acquired from high above the moon's northern polar region (visible at bottom) and looks southward.

The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2006 at a distance of approximately 66,000 kilometers (41,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 104 degrees. Image scale is 396 meters (1,300 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 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: October 4, 2006 (PIA 08280)
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