The Stunning Icy Landscape of Saturn's Moon Enceladus., page

These are the stunning images captured by the Cassini spacecraft as it headed towards Saturn's moon Enceladus before it made a daring dive just miles from the surface.

Travelling at 40,000MPH and just 82,000ft over the moon, the 'white-knuckle' flyby was the closest yet past any of Saturn's moons.

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Some stunning pictures taken from just 16 miles above the moon's surface!



(fixed link)

[edit on 14-10-2008 by Jbird]

For football's sake! lol

Let's see if this one does.

reply to post by Barathrum

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it looks like a gigantic round winterfresh breath mint and that makes me happy

A breath mint gobstopper! Looks more like a fairly large and waterless fur ball.

But, with that, it is an eerily beautiful fur ball (or tumbleweed without the tumble or the weed). Looks like one hell of a 'grand' canyon there in the center.

Good find! Its like something I would have as my desktop background.

reply to post by jakyll

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Thanks for the post - very cool pics - the last one of the southern hemisphere is awesome. Wish I had more to add but am awed by the stark beauty.

ColoradoJens

Article

Brief Enceladus description...
Enceladus [en-SELL-ah-dus] is one of the innermost moons of Saturn. It is quite similar in size to Mimas but has a smoother, brighter surface. Enceladus reflects almost 100 percent of the sunlight that strikes it. Unlike Mimas, Enceladus displays at least five different types of terrain. Parts of Enceladus shows craters no larger than 35 km in diameter. Other areas show regions with no craters indicating major resurfacing events in the geologically recent past. There are fissures, plains, corrugated terrain and other crustal deformations. All of this indicates that the interior of the moon may be liquid today, even though it should have frozen aeons ago. It is postulated that Enceladus is heated by a tidal mechanism similar to Jupiter's moon Io. It is perturbed in its orbit by Saturn's gravitational field and by the large neighboring satellites Tethys and Dione. Because Enceladus reflects so much sunlight, the surface temperature is only -201° C (-330° F).

Interesting stuff...wonder if the interior is still liquid.

That would be something to behold as well...

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