Saturnian Encounter

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus looms before the Cassini spacecraft, which swept just a few hundred miles from the moon on October 19. This image, snapped from a distance of about 45,000 miles (72,000 km), also shows Saturn's bright rings, viewed edge-on, to the right of Enceladus. Most of Enceladus is in shadow, but the limb shows the moon's irregular icy terrain. The small moon shoots water and ice into space from hotspots near its south pole, and Cassini has studied this plume extensively. [NASA/JPL/SSI]