Image: Saturn-facing hemisphere of Enceladus

Image: Saturn-facing hemisphere of Enceladus
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

The brightly lit limb of a crescent Enceladus looks ethereal against the blackness of space. The rest of the moon, lit by light reflected from Saturn, presents a ghostly appearance.

Enceladus (313 miles or 504 kilometers across) is back-lit in this image, as is apparent by the thin crescent. However, the Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft (or phase) angle, at 141 degrees, is too low to make the 's famous plumes easily visible.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Enceladus. North on Enceladus is up. The above image is a composite of images taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 29, 2017 using filters that allow infrared, green, and . The image filter centered on 930 nm (IR) was is red in this image, the image filter centered on the green is green, and the image filter centered on 338 nm (UV) is blue.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 110,000 miles (180,000 kilometers) from Enceladus. Image scale is 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) per pixel.

The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on Sept. 15, 2017.

More information: For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

The Cassini imaging team homepage is at ciclops.org

Citation: Image: Saturn-facing hemisphere of Enceladus (2017, September 29) retrieved 26 April 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2017-09-image-saturn-facing-hemisphere-enceladus.html
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