PIA20010: Craters Crowd the North


Craters Crowd the North

Caption:

This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows battered terrain around the north pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Craters crowd and overlap each other, each one recording an impact in the moon's distant past.

The moon's north pole lies approximately at the top of this view from Cassini's wide-angle camera. A companion view from the narrow-angle camera ( PIA19660 ) shows the pole at a resolution about ten times higher.

North on Enceladus is up. The image was taken in visible light by Cassini on Oct. 14, 2015.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 4,000 miles (6,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 8 degrees. Image scale is 1,093 feet (333 meters) per pixel.

Background Info:

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

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

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Enceladus
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera, Wide Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Impact, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2015-10-15
Date in Caption 2015-10-14
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA20010
Identifier PIA20010