* Astronomy

As it swooped past the South Pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus on July 14, 2005, Cassini acquired increasingly high-resolution views of this puzzling ice world. These views have been combined into this exciting movie sequence. The movie provides a stunning, up-close look at what is surely one of the youngest surfaces in the Saturn system.
From afar, Enceladus exhibits a bizarre mixture of softened craters and complex, fractured terrains. The movie zooms in on the southern polar terrains and closes in on one of the tectonic stripes that characterise this region, which is essentially free of sizeable impact scars.
The bright oblong area seen during the zoom is an intermediate resolution image from near the time of closest approach that has been melded into the lower resolution mosaic, and artificially brightened.
The movie ends on the highest resolution image acquired by Cassini which reveals a surface dominated by ice blocks between 10 and 100 meters across, lying in a region that is unusual in its lack of the very fine-grained frost that seems to cover the rest of Enceladus.
The lack of frost and the absence of craters are indicators of a youthful surface.
The initial image in the movie is a large mosaic of 21 narrow-angle camera images that have been arranged to provide a full-disk view of the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Enceladus. This mosaic is a false-colour view that includes images taken at wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the infrared portion of the spectrum, and is similar to another, lower resolution false-colour view obtained during the flyby. In false-colour, many long fractures on Enceladus exhibit a pronounced difference in colour (represented here in blue) from the surrounding terrain.
A leading explanation for the difference in colour is that the walls of the fractures expose outcrops of coarse-grained ice that are free of the powdery surface materials that mantle flat-lying surfaces.
The original images in the false-colour mosaic range in resolution from 350 to 67 meters per pixel and were taken from distances ranging from 61,300 to 11,100 kilometres from Enceladus. The mosaic is also available separately.
Image scale is about 37 meters per pixel in the wide-angle camera image and about 4 meters per pixel in the narrow-angle image. Both of these ultra-high resolution views were acquired from an altitude of approximately 208 kilometres above Enceladus as the spacecraft near the time of closest approach during the flyby.

This mage of Enceladus was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on March 12, 2008, when it was approximately 12,511 kilometres away.


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Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters.

Credit: NASA/JPL

This graphic shows the trajectory for the Cassini spacecraft during its close brush with the icy outpost of Enceladus on March 12, 2008. At closet approach Cassini will be 50 kilometers from the surface, while flying through the plume Cassini's altitude will be 200 kilometres from the moon.