Sliver of Enceladus

The Cassini spacecraft captures a crescent of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

See Bursting at the Seams and New to Old on Enceladus to learn about this moon and the spectacular water ice plumes emanating from its south polar region.

Lit terrain seen here is in the area between the leading hemisphere and Saturn-facing 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, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 259,000 kilometers (161,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 125 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (6,600 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute