13 July 2007
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
NASA recently published an interesting image of Saturn's icy, geologically active moon Enceladus. The image was acquired by the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft.
Enceladus appears almost featureless in this far-off view, with dark markings near the moon's south pole. These markings, known as sulci, are long fractures from which a spray of icy particles erupts into space. This spray is believed to be the source of the E ring, Saturn's outermost, diffuse ring.
Like our Moon (3,476 km across), Enceladus (505 km across) keeps the same face turned to its parent planet. Cassini was looking toward Enceladus' Saturn-facing side.
The image was taken with Cassini's narrow-angle camera on 27 May 2007, applying an infrared filter. The spacecraft was approximately 615,000 km from Enceladus. Image scale is 4 km per pixel.
Further Reading
Cassini-Huygens Mission
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem