Reconstructing the Past on Enceladus

December 15, 2008
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The most prominent jets of vapor and icy particles emerging from the south polar terrain of Saturn’s moon Enceladus are shown here in graphical form in a movie clip of a “rotating” Enceladus.
A mosaic constructed of images of Enceladus' southern hemisphere (see PIA11126) from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft imaging science sub-system was projected onto a computer model of the moon to which vectors indicating the direction of the jets were added. 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