As scientists gleefully examine photographic data taken by the Cassini spacecraft during its recent fly-by of Saturn's moon Enceladus, they have been delighted to discover the cameras were able to capture the point from which the moon's remarkable geysers emanate.
Img: Closeup of Enceladus\' "tiger stripes". Credit: NASA
New pictures captured in exquisite detail reveal the tiger stripe fissures from which icy water geysers spew forth into space and replenish Saturn's rings.
"This is the mother lode for us," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "A place that may ultimately reveal just exactly what kind of environment -- habitable or not -- we have within this tortured little moon."
A special technique, known as 'skeet-shooting', was developed by controllers to cancel out the high speed of the moon relative to Cassini and also help obtain ultra-sharp views as the spacecraft sped past the icy moon at 64,000 kilometers per hour (40,000 miles per hour) on August 11.
"Knowing exactly where to point, at just the right time, was critical to this event," said Paul Helfenstein, Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY., who developed and used the skeet-shoot technique to design the image sequence. "The challenge is equivalent to trying to capture a sharp, unsmeared picture of a distant roadside billboard with a telephoto lens out the window of a speeding car."
"Enceladus was streaking across the sky so quickly that the spacecraft had no hope of tracking any feature on its surface," he added. "Our best option was to point the spacecraft far ahead of Enceladus, spin the spacecraft and camera as fast as possible in the direction of Enceladus' predicted path, and let Enceladus overtake us at a time when we could match its motion across the sky, snapping images along the way."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project spread between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
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