This close-up view of Enceladus looks toward the moon’s terminator (the transition from day to night) and shows a distinctive pattern of continuous, ridged, slightly curved and roughly parallel faults within the moon’s southern polar latitudes. These surface features have been informally referred to by imaging scientists as “tiger stripes” due to their distinctly stripe-like appearance when viewed in false-color (see PIA06249).
Illumination of the scene is from the lower left. The image was obtained in visible light with the narrow angle camera on July 14, 2005, from a distance of about 20,720 kilometers (12,880 miles) from Enceladus and from a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46 degrees. The image scale is 122 meters (400 feet) per pixel. The image has been contrast enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: July 26, 2005 (PIA 06247)
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PIA 06247
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