* Astronomy

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RE: Enceladus

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News from Saturn

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Raw photo mosaic of Enceladus taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on October 09, 2008 when the spaceprobe was approximately 38,323 kilometres away.

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Credit NASA

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The Cassini orbiter came through its closest-ever encounter with a Saturnian moon with flying colours - and with a fresh crop of cool black-and-white pictures of Enceladus. The most precious products of Thursday's 16-mile-high pass weren't the pictures, but the samplings of the mysterious stuff welling up from the cracks in Enceladus' icy surface.

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Thursday's fly-by and another set for 31 October may also reveal changes in the icy moon. Temperatures over one of the tiger-stripe fractures visited in 11 August were lower than those measured in earlier visits.
The fracture, called Damascus Sulcus, appeared to have a temperature of about minus 106 °C, which was 12 °C cooler than March's fly-by. But researchers are not yet sure whether the measurement is accurate.

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NASA's Cassini spacecraft is scheduled to fly within 16 miles of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Oct. 9 and measure molecules in its space environment that could give insight into the history of the solar system.

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The Oct. 9 flyby is an inside pitchthe closest flyby yet of any moon of Saturn, at only 25 kilometres (16 miles) from the surface. The Oct. 31 flyby is farther out, at 196 kilometres (122 miles).

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Baghdad and Cairo Sulci on Enceladus

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Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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Damascus Sulcus on Enceladus
Features on Enceladus are named for characters and places from "The Arabian Nights," and the four most prominent sulci are named Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus. Here, Damascus Sulcus runs across the centre, from left to right.

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Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Blobrana · L

In a feat of interplanetary sharpshooting, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has pinpointed precisely where the icy jets erupt from the surface of Saturn's geologically active moon Enceladus.
New carefully targeted pictures reveal exquisite details in the prominent south polar "tiger stripe" fractures from which the jets emanate. The images show the fractures are about 300 metres deep, with V-shaped inner walls. The outer flanks of some of the fractures show extensive deposits of fine material. Finely fractured terrain littered with blocks of ice tens of meters in size and larger (the size of small houses) surround the fractures.

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The Cassini spacecraft has returned some remarkable new close-up images of the Saturnian moon Enceladus.
They were captured during a flyby on 11 August, with the probe passing above the icy terrain at a distance of just 50km at closest approach.

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