Nine days and change to Enceladus

[mmcirvin]

On March 12th, the Cassini spacecraft will pass just 50 km from the surface of Saturn's small, peculiar moon Enceladus. Enceladus is close enough to Saturn that you can actually see that it's stretched out a little by tidal forces if you get a picture from just the right angle (the effect's more obvious for Mimas). It looks sort of like a mini-Europa, with a geologically young icy surface crossed by cracks and folds. Previous encounters with Enceladus revealed that the moon has active jets of water vapor shooting out of the "tiger stripe" markings at its south pole, apparently from some reservoir of liquid below the ice, for reasons that are still not entirely clear. It's abruptly shot to somewhere near the top of the list of possible homes for extraterrestrial life, which gets it a lot of press, though even if there's no life there the place is mighty interesting.

I think this is the closest flyby planned for the entire mission, or close to it. The best pictures will be several times finer than this one, which I think is one of the closest images taken so far.

Comments

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post - I love enchiladas and look forward to eating them.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Jeez, man, be careful — didn't you just read that enchilada spews steam??