Searching for Warmth

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Caption:

The exciting mystery of an active south polar region on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus continues to unfold as scientists make the correlation between geologically youthful surface fractures and unusually warm temperatures.

This view shows excess heat radiation from cracks near the moon's south pole. These warm fissures are the source of plumes of dust and gas seen by multiple instruments on the Cassini spacecraft during its flyby of Enceladus on July 14, 2005, as described in a series of papers in the March 10, 2006, issue of the journal Science.

This image shows two arrays of temperature readings across the surface of Enceladus, as measured by the Cassini composite infrared spectrometer, superimposed on images of the surface taken simultaneously by the imaging science subsystem.

Surface temperatures in Kelvin, derived from the intensity of infrared radiation detected by composite infrared spectrometer, are shown along with their formal uncertainties, although true uncertainties for temperatures below about 75 Kelvin (minus 325 degrees Fahrenheit) are not easily described by a single number.

Enhanced thermal emission is seen in the vicinity of the prominent "tiger stripe" fissures discovered by the imaging cameras. In this image, the excess emission is near the center of the composite infrared spectrometer array, directly over a tiger stripe fissure. The peak temperatures, 86 Kelvin and 90 Kelvin (minus 305 and minus 298 degrees Fahrenheit) respectively, are averages over the composite infrared spectrometer field of view, and other composite and infrared spectrometer data suggest that much higher temperatures, up to at least 145 Kelvin (minus 199 degrees Fahrenheit), occur in narrow zones a few hundred meters wide along the tiger stripe fissures. See PIA07793 for a related image.

This image was taken nearly three times closer to the moon and is centered near longitude 120 west, latitude 82 south, and each composite infrared spectrometer field of view is 6.0 kilometers (3.7 miles) across.

This Cassini narrow-angle camera image was cropped and resized for presentation.

Background Info:

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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The composite infrared spectrometer team is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 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 composite infrared spectrometer team homepage is http://cirs.gsfc.nasa.gov/ . The imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org

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