This image was taken during Cassini's extremely close encounter with Enceladus on Oct. 9, 2008.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 9, 2008, a distance of approximately 42,000 kilometers (26,000 miles) from Enceladus. Image scale is 503 meters (1,650 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://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.