The ice jets of Enceladus send particles streaming into space hundreds of kilometers above the south pole of this spectacularly active moon. Some of the particles escape to form the diffuse E ring around Saturn.
Specialists at the CICLOPS Cassini Imaging Team in Boulder, Colorado processed the color-coded image to enhance faint signals, making the contours and extent of the fainter, larger-scale component of the plume easier to see.
The bright strip behind and above Enceladus, 505 kilometers (314 miles) across, is the E ring, in which this intriguing body resides. The small round object at far left is a background star.
Cassini took the original image in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 24 at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.
