CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Ultraviolet Enceladus

Ultraviolet Enceladus
PIA 06483
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   Looking beyond Saturn's south pole, this was the Cassini spacecraft's view of distant, icy Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles wide) on July 28, 2004. The planet itself shows few obvious features at these ultraviolet wavelengths, due to scattering of light by molecules of the gases high in the atmosphere.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera from a distance of 7.4 million kilometers (4.6 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths of light. The image scale is 44 kilometers (27 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: September 23, 2004 (PIA 06483)
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