Trailing Enceladus

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the varied surface of the trailing hemisphere of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

North on Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) is up. For a more detailed view of this hemisphere, see Enceladus: Trailing Hemisphere.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 25, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 594,000 kilometers (369,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 66 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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