This view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus and its prominent plumes was taken by the Cassini
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Enceladus's unusual plume is only easily visible when the Cassini
spacecraft and the Sun are on opposite sides of Enceladus. So what's
lighting up the moon then? It's light reflected off Saturn. This
lighting trick allows the Cassini spacecraft to capture both the
back-lit plume and the surface of Enceladus in one shot.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Enceladus. North
on Enceladus is up. The image was taken in blue light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 2, 2013.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 517,000 miles
(832,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 175 degrees. Image scale is 3 miles (5 kilometers)
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 in
Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were
designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .
