Two sources of light illuminate the textured surface of the moon Enceladus.
On the right of the image, sunlight bathes the anti-Saturn side of this
geologically active moon. Saturnshine dimly lights the Saturn-facing side
of the moon on the left of the image. The moon's surface is scarred by
fractures, folds, and ridges.
This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Enceladus (504
kilometers, or 313 miles across). North on Enceladus is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 26, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 199,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) from Enceladus and at
a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 97 degrees. Image scale is
about 1 kilometer (3,281 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.