Ice Fountains

Multiple jets of icy particles are blasted into space by the active venting on Saturn¿s moon Enceladus.

This image was acquired in a viewing geometry that makes the tiny particles in the Enceladus plume easy to see.

This view was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 18, 2006, at a distance of approximately 930,000 kilometers (578,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 154 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (3 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