This stunning picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft was tweeted yesterday by Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Cassini imaging team, and I thought I’d share it here. Taken late last year, the image shows a close-up of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, with Saturn’s rings visible in the background. More info is given in the official caption at Cassini imaging hub Ciclops:
Cassini looks over cratered and tectonically deformed terrain on Saturn’s moon Enceladus as the camera also catches a glimpse of the planet’s rings in the background of this image from the spacecraft’s flyby of the moon on Nov. 30, 2010. Geologically young terrain in the middle latitudes of the moon gives way to older, cratered terrain in the northern latitudes. See PIA11685 to learn more. This view is centered on terrain at 41 degrees north latitude, 202 degrees west longitude. North on Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) is up and rotated 28 degrees to the right. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 46,000 kilometers (29,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 14 degrees. Image scale is 276 meters (905 feet) per pixel.
Nice!
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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