image: Recent Cassini images of Enceladus at high phase show the fountain-like sources of the fine spray of material that towers above the moon's south polar region. This image was taken looking more or less broadside at the 'tiger stripe' fractures observed in earlier Enceladus images and shows discrete and small-scale plumes above the limb of the moon.
The color-coded image at right was processed to enhance faint signals, making contours in the plume of material even more apparent. The greatly enhanced and colorized image shows the enormous extent of the fainter, larger-scale component of the plume.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute