CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Special Holiday Raw Preview #1

Special Holiday Raw Preview #1
Avg Rating: 9.23/10

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   This raw, unprocessed image of Enceladus was taken by Cassini on Dec. 25, 2009.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 25, 2009 at a distance of approximately 617,000 kilometers (384,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 174 degrees. Image scale is 37 kilometers (23 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. 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 Equinox Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: December 27, 2009
Image/Caption Information


Alliance Member Comments
Dragon_of_Luck_Mah_Jonng1971 (Dec 31, 2009 at 1:21 PM):
A side note: Interesting and beautiful.
Red_dragon (Dec 30, 2009 at 3:10 PM):
33.33333333...% Science
33.33333333...% Art
33.33333333...% Epic
stowaway (Dec 30, 2009 at 12:27 PM):
Art
Plutonean (Dec 28, 2009 at 0:51 AM):
Well moon singular technically.

The sense of scale here is impressive - there's something I just really love about this one.
Plutonean (Dec 28, 2009 at 0:50 AM):
Love this image
Starkly lit
The rings
The moons
Its such a hit!

Thanks - this is superluminous (ie. beyond mere brilliance.) :-)