Scars on an Active World

This nearly equatorial view shows cratered regions on Enceladus in the central part of its leading hemisphere and high northern latitudes. Much of the rest of the geologically active moon is relatively crater free and covered by fractures and folds.

North on Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) is up.

The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 28, 2007 at a distance of approximately 293,000 kilometers (182,000 miles) from Enceladus. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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