PIA12770: Sliver of Enceladus
NASA's Cassini spacecraft captures a crescent of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Lit terrain seen here is in the area between the leading hemisphere and Saturn-facing side of Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across). North on Enceladus is up.
 Target Name:  Enceladus
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens 
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle 
 Product Size:  820 x 820 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA12770.tif (673.4 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA12770.jpg (11.75 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

The Cassini spacecraft captures a crescent of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

See PIA11688 and PIA11685 to learn about this moon and the spectacular water ice plumes emanating from its south polar region.

Lit terrain seen here is in the area between the leading hemisphere and Saturn-facing side 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 May 10, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 259,000 kilometers (161,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 125 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (6,600 feet) per pixel.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2011-06-13