Enceladus Afar

Enceladus is seen here, across the unilluminated side of Saturn's rings. A hint of the moon's active south polar region can be seen as a just slightly dark area at bottom.

This view was obtained from about 1 degree above the ringplane. Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.

The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 27, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Enceladus. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) 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