Enceladus appears as a rather bland orb in this far-off snapshot, but the dark markings near its south pole belie that assumption. The markings, called sulci, are long, roughly parallel fractures from which a spray of icy particles escapes into the void, forming Saturn’s E ring. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across). North is up. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 27, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 615,000 kilometers (382,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 3 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

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