Enceladus and the E-Ring

As Enceladus spews water ice from its south polar region, the Cassini spacecraft chronicles the moon creating Saturn's faint E ring, in which the moon orbits.

See PIA11688 and PIA08321 to learn more about this active moon and how it creates the E ring. The E ring can just barely be seen here. The most brightly lit terrain seen on the moon here (on the left of the moon) is illuminated by the Sun and is on the leading hemisphere of Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across). Light reflected off Saturn covers a larger area on the Saturn-facing side of the moon on the right.

North on Enceladus is up. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 26, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 993,000 kilometers (617,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute