Looking Over Enceladus
The Cassini spacecraft looks over cratered and tectonically deformed terrain on Saturn's moon Enceladus as the camera also catches a glimpse of the planet's rings in the background. The image was captured during the spacecraft's flyby of Enceladus on Nov. 30, 2010.
Geologically young terrain in the middle latitudes of the moon gives way to older, cratered terrain in the northern latitudes. See PIA11685 to learn more. This view is centered on terrain at 41 degrees north latitude, 202 degrees west longitude. North on Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles, across) is up and rotated 28 degrees to the right.
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 46,000 kilometers (29,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 14 degrees. Image scale is 276 meters (906 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Image addition date: 2011-01-24