Differently Aged Terrain

The Cassini spacecraft examines old and new terrain on Saturn's fascinating Enceladus, a moon where jets of water ice particles and vapor spew from the south pole.

Newly created terrain is at the bottom, in the center and on the left of this view. Older, cratered terrain is on the right. See New to Old on Enceladus for another view of this area and more information about its geology. This image was captured during Cassini's Nov. 21, 2009, flyby of the moon. This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across). North on Enceladus is up and rotated 3 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 133,000 kilometers (83,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46 degrees. Image scale is 796 meters (2,612 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