A Fresh Face

The leading hemisphere of Enceladus displays a remarkably fresh-looking surface in this recent Cassini view. At this resolution, only a few craters can be made out in this wrinkled region of the geologically active moon's surface. A far more heavily cratered, and older, terrain region is visible to the northwest.

This view is centered on 15 degrees north latitude, 109 degrees west longitude. North on Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 30, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 108,000 kilometers (67,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. Image scale is 646 meters (2,119 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute