Six days to go until Enceladus flyby ( E2? ) at 175 km

We also get NT encounters. I hope we get those images also.

I should be posting my E2 preview either today (maybe...) or early next week on my blog.

That E2 preview is now online:
http://volcanopele.blogspot.com/2005/07/en...her-rev-11.html

21000 km to Enceladus

Can't wait to see the images tomorrow

Yep I have my panorama software ready and waiting

Let's hope that the rawimages website won't suffer from the Red Cross Disease again

Should be neat to see the images. I have been watching using Celestia to visualize the view of Enceladus from Cassini's vantage point. It is running with a real-time animation using a version of my Enceladus map.

I don't expect anything till monday. When an encouter falls so close to the weekend we get plauged by the red x problem.

Update on the Cassini website:

Enceladus Flyby Update
The Cassini spacecraft conducted its closest flyby yet, coming within 175 kilometers (109 miles) from the surface of Enceladus. Data collected is currently being downloaded. Raw images are expected to appear on this web site at around 10 p.m. PDT.


http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

http://ciclops.org/view_event.php?id=22

From 545 kilometers

actually, that's distance to target center so the altitude is actually 295 km

2 m/pixel

WOW!!! Why are the boulders so rounded and what are those dark holes!!!

Is that Enceladus or a block of London flats after The Blitz?

Fascinating right angles, there...

-the other Doug

Wow. This terrain looks strikingly similar to Europa.

First mosaic of this fly-by. Looks like it was take in Saturn shine:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/saturn/Enceladus5.jpg

Nice distant view of the tiger scratches (or whatever they're called).

Six frame highres mosaic. Some artifacts due to the changing viewing geometry between frames though

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/saturn/Enceladus6.jpg

Three frame mosaic. Couldn't get the bottom left quadrant to fit properly

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/saturn/Enceladus7.jpg

DEChengst: I can't get any of your links tonight to load, either viewing them directly, or using the 'Save As' trick. "The page you are looking for is currently unavailable" message.

Note... that Super-High-Rez image is motion blurred. Nice linear blur. Should be easy to deconvolve to nearly full resolution.

Wonderful images!

Ed, I was able to download DEChengst's images at 6:30AM CDT, FWIW.

--Bill

Am I seeing things?


The Tiger scratches seem to have something coming out of them!?

Like a haze. It could be along the sides of the 3 cracks possible on the ground.

This is speculation on my part.

Here is another version of the crescent mosaic...I processed it to hide the saturn-shine areas so that you can't see the missing areas.

Also I can see that the 'Tiger scratches' are somewhat darker, yet I interpret that somewhat differently. Imagine you have a snow like material or ice grinded into small pebbles by meteorites etc covering most of the surface. Any upwelling from below, be it a billion years ago or perhaps more recent would quickly freeze and create darker ice near the cracks. So thats what I think we see, cracks with a lining of clearer material therefore darker ice.

Here is where the closeup image N00037070.jpg fits in the larger one (W00009337.jpg)
Dead on the center

Wow, especially the tiger scratches look amazing!!

Hey... check out that diamond shaped region to the upper right of the "tiger scratches" in the above referenced image. Anyone remember Miranda's "chevron" feature?...

Very strange morphology. Some of the larger "scratches" seem to show evidence of parts of the wall sliding into the valleys. Also notice how some craters show radial cracks in addidion to the main crack pattern and the virtual absence of impact craters in the lower part of the mosaic. This is fairly young terrain.

tty

I was surprised to the the boulders is closest image. I don't remember seeing boulders in the closeups of Europa

I refer to the high res image of Enceladus. I suspect a pixel size of about 6-7 meters because the distance is 545km acc. RAW data and 2x2 binning of the sensor. These boulders must be really large ones !
IMHO the larger distance results from the other black images, that shows smaller distances than Enceldaus radius (for example W00009338.jpg in 210 km distance).
Further it could be still larger away because of the oblique angle of this particular shot.

Robert Schulz

Obviously, remnants of surficial cracking from either gravitic stresses on Enceladus or from internal stresses which caused upwelling from the cracks.

Europa, anyone? This looks like extensive cracking atop a liquid ocean...

-the other Doug

Thanks for answer the puzzle
Made with it a little GIF animation: http://www.greuti.ch/cassini/enceladus_closest.gif

Double post.

Nice work!

My attempt at a colored image. Note I'm new at this!
DEChengst I hope you don't mind me using your stitched image (One of my favs )

Sure I don't mind. Anyone can use or publish my images as long as it comes with the words "stitched by DEChengst"

I don't think so, this looks more like some kind of icy version of plate tectonics than an ice-covered world ocean.

tty

I'm going to cover this in a blog post later today, but I agree with you, at least in that I don't think there is an ocean. A lot of people are focusing on the similarties between Enceladus and Europa, but they seem to ignore the major differences. Europa's surface age is the same to within an order of magnitude through the surface, whereas there are significant differences in surface age (or at least crater retention age) between various regions on Enceladus. You have a nearly crater free south polar region, while the north polar region appears to be very heavily cratered. This dichonomy is more reminiscent of Miranda than Europa. so I suspect that the current diapir theory for corona formation on Miranda might work for planitia formation on Enceladus, with some modifications.

I agree with you to some extent. The second image on volcanopele's site was what I was referring to when I made that comment. Unlike Europa, the surface of Enceladus is more diverse and the age of the surface varies with different regions. And I agree with volcanopele in the sense that the likelihood of there being an ocean is much lower than on Europa.

I think there's something more dramatic going on at Enceladus than at Miranda. First, we have the multiple evidence for outgassing, which indicates current activity. Then, we have the extreme youth of some of the tectonic features -- just look, for instance at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...eiImageID=45673 .

I think that what we're seeing at Enceladus -- just as it's believed we're seeing it at the inner three Galilean satellites -- is INTERMITTENT tidally stimulated geological activity over cycles of tens to hundreds of millions of years, produced by the fact that the moons keep drifting into and out of more or less intense resonance relationships as they slowly spiral away from their central planets. In the case of Enceladus, the cycles are a lot slower and less intense than with Europa -- a matter of 100 or 200 million years, rather than just a few tens of millions, and not intense or widespread enough to obliterate most of the moon's craters -- but they are nevertheless there. I suspect Enceladus' remaining outgassing is a result of the fact that it's still cooling off from its last period of maximum tidal heating. But I also wouldn't be surprised if, even at its maximum, Enceladus' geological activity didn't take the form of oozing warm-ice diapirs with only a relatively small amount of liquid water/ammonia mixed in, just as Jason suggests.

Having said that, let me add that the geology of the Uranian satellites is one of my biggest remaining areas of ignorance about the Solar System -- I just haven't quite gotten round to studying them yet, for some reason.

Looking at the raw images of the south polar region on Enceladus, I don't see *** ANY *** impact craters in large swaths of the swirly-ridge-and-trough terrains. This surface is young. Damn young. ?tens? of millions of years max, maybe.

And at the contact between the two terrains at the bottom 1/4 of the image, there is a line of boulders.

Odd place, this...

--Bill

A nice little shot of Pandora over the clouds of Saturn has come in!

That was quick: updated map of Enceladus on Steve Albers website
http://laps.fsl.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html

Does steve have polar projections?

I shamelessly stole Steve Albers' cylindrical projection of Enceladus (thanks!) and made this polar projection of the southern hemisphere (just using the polar coordinates function in Photoshop):

Click to view attachment

Incidentally, the saturnshine images from the last imaging sequence on this orbit show new territory west of Voyager 2 coverage which could be added in to the northern hemisphere of the map.


Phil

Very nice.

I wonder how enceladus magnetic field/south pole lines up with those "4 cat scratches"

Another attempt at a coloring.


I'm not sure how this is done correctly.
Is there a site that explains how to this in adobe?

I think that we got some pretty good coverage of the North Polar region on the leading hemisphere from Saturnshine images. As for the other side, the highest resolution Voyager set covers much of it. I am working on a super-res image.

I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't found any signs of ice volcanoes or guysers yet.

Phil,

Thanks for the polar view - interesting to see it all laid out. I'll probably be working on adding one or more additional sunlit images from this flyby, particularly at high southerly latitudes. After that I can see what would be involved in some of the Saturnshine images.