Moon With a Warm Heart

Few large craters are to be found in the wrinkled terrain of Enceladus, where the surface has been reworked by geologic processes presumably resulting from the moon's inner warmth.

Cassini spied the bright crescent of Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approximately 628,000 kilometers (391,000 miles). The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 103 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 miles) 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, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute