Serene Enceladus

Saturn's moon Enceladus looks tranquil here, concealing the true nature of this active moon.

To learn about the icy plumes jetting from Enceladus' south polar region, see Plumewatch and Jet Blue.

Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across). North on Enceladus is up. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 10, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 766,000 kilometers (476,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Image scale is 5 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