CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Exciting Orb

Enceladus appears as a rather bland orb in this far-off snapshot, but the dark markings near its south pole belie that assumption. The markings, called sulci, are long, roughly parallel fractures from which a spray of icy particles escapes into the void, forming Saturn's E ring.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 27, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 615,000 kilometers (382,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 3 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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 10, 2007 (PIA 08980)
Image/Caption Information 		  Exciting Orb
PIA 08980
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