NASA Cassini-Huygens Collection

A Pearl at Dusk

Enceladus hangs like a single bright pearl against the golden-brown canvas of Saturn and its icy rings.

Enceladus hangs like a single bright pearl against the golden-brown canvas of Saturn and its icy rings. Visible on Saturn is the region where daylight gives way to dusk. Above, the rings throw thin shadows onto the planet.

Icy Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were taken using the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2006 at a distance of approximately 200,000 kilometers (100,000 miles) from Enceladus. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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.n…. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

*Credit:* NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

March 7, 2006

Saturn

rings

Enceladus

pearl

Saturn

Cassini

Cassini-Huygens

Huygens Probe

Cassini Orbiter

Enceladus

Saturn

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

California

Washington

Enceladus

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Washington, D.C.

March 7, 2006

2006

SPD-SATRN-2019

http://saturn.jpl.n…