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Sliced-up craters on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE Posted: March 24, 2005
This scene is an icy landscape that has been scored by tectonic forces. Many of the craters in this terrain have been heavily modified, such as the 10-kilometer-wide (6-mile-wide) crater near the upper right that has prominent north-south fracturing along its northeastern slope. The image has been rotated so that north on Enceladus is up. The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera from a distance of about 11,900 kilometers (7,400 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 44 degrees. Pixel scale in the image is 70 meters (230 feet) per pixel.
The image has been rotated so that north on Enceladus is up. This region is a transition from cratered to wrinkled terrain. Westward (left) of the central rift that divides the two regions are relatively parallel grooves and ridges that are reminiscent of terrain on Jupiter's large moon Ganymede. Very few craters are seen in this area of Enceladus. Eastward (right) of the large rift the terrain becomes more cratered, although the craters are quite degraded (meaning soft and shallow in appearance). A prominent fracture runs north-south to the center of the image, then turns sharply to the southwest, cutting across cratered terrain, the large rift, and the grooved terrain. This behavior signifies that it is one of the youngest features in this image. The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera from a distance of about 14,000 kilometers (8,800 miles) and from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 44 degrees. Pixel scale in the image is about 85 meters (280 feet) per pixel.
The image was taken in visible light with Cassini's narrow-angle camera from a distance of about 25,700 kilometers (16,000 miles, red-colored image) and from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46 degrees. Pixel scale is 150 meters (490 feet) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced to aid visibility. 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, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The magnetometer team is based at Imperial College in London, working with team members from the United States and Germany. |
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