CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Astral Pearl

Astral Pearl
PIA 08915
Avg Rating: 7.77/10

Full Size 304x314:
JPEG 4 KB
PNG 16 KB
TIFF 96 KB
   The high northern latitudes on Enceladus show little detail from Cassini's distant vantage point, nearly 50 degrees above the moon's equator.

The plume of icy material that jets from the south pole of Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) is not visible in this viewing geometry.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 26, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 95 degrees. Scale in the original image was 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The image was contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of two.

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: April 11, 2007 (PIA 08915)
Image/Caption Information