Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
I’m very happy to report that we’ve just put one more major milestone in this remarkable adventure successfully behind us.
Another bold dip over the south pole of Enceladus and another skillful setup for imaging the moon ‘on the fly’ have brought us another bounty of positively glorious views of one of the most fabulous places in the solar system.
On this run, we have captured, by design, jet source regions we didn’t catch the first time: sources VI (see https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11134.html )
and VII ( see https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11127.html ) on and near the Baghdad tiger stripe, and we repeated our imaging of II and III on Damascus. In all, we’ve now seen at very high resolution (tens of meters per pixel) sources I, II, III, V, VI, and VII. (See http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=pia08385
for a map of these locales). And of course, as before, we note that the region of the active tiger stripes is finely-fractured throughout and littered with icy blocks.
Our next flyby of Enceladus, as you may know, is not for another year. The sun will be disappearing from the south pole throughout that time, so that by next year we will have a far dimmer view of a shrinking portion of the south polar terrain. So, take your fill of this fabulous place now, because it will be a very, very long time before you see it like this again.
Here are three more images we posted from yesterday’s flyby:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11125.html
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11124.html
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11108.html