Three days away!
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...fm?imageID=1361

WOW! Lots of coverge!



Looks like filling Low res images will be fun for the Mapers.

There are a few pictures of Enceladus coming in, these are on the CICLOPS site, they haven't appeared on the JPL RAW page yet

http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view_event.php?id=11

Only a few hours to go until closest approach

And I though Europa was melting.

One side looks totally reworked.

In the latest image, parts of the Moon, particularly towards the lft limb, seem to resemble some of the cracks seen on Europa.

first group of raw images of enceladus are up

OMG! I'm Floored!


This moon looks more like Ganymede!

How deep can those grooves be?

Enceladus looks even more strange than I expected - remarkably similar to Europa in fact. And I can't see a single impact crater in this image (there are a few features that at first glance looked like craters but I think they are mounds).

That deep fracture is impressive!
The young areas of Enceladus seem to show a much greater range of topography than Europa. If so, Enceladus' putative ocean/warm ice is likely *less* accessible today than the one belonging to its smooth jovian cousin. This area of the crust must be cold and brittle to great depths to support these topographic features. It looks like we arrived too late.

Having looked at more images I now realize that what I first thought were craters and then thought were mounds really are craters:



There are both ridges and grooves there. Looks like a strange mix of Europa and Ganymede to me. However, judging from the craters at least this area is hardly active now.

Perhaps Enceladus went through successive stages of Europa-like 'cracked-eggshell' terrain and Ganymedean 'ridges & grooves' tectonism as the warm-ice retreated to greater depths. The process seems to have ended with these deep (Dione-esque) fractures.

Why is there so much missing data on the right hand side? Can they correct that?

The ridges in this shot look quite like the ones on Europa

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028194.jpg

Looking at the distant images, I don't think these show the very youngest looking terrain that we saw on TC. There may be some younger terrain yet on this moon.

It's not missing - it's interlaced

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028164.jpg

This image shows what I am talking about. If you look at the lower right, there seems to be some kind of terrain is at this resolution craterless and appears to be on top of the terrain we are now looking at, even possibly cutting one crater in half. I wonder if E4 will get us coverage of this!

.....ummmmmmm what does that mean lol

Whenever I saw pictures like that I always assumed it was a problem with the camera lol

Not sure exactly what it means - but if I de-interlace it in photoshop, it goes away

Doug

http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/cassini..._peek_0216.html

The images posted above were captured only hours ago. They were posted on the website of the Cassini imaging team as part of a new effort to get images from the most interesting encounters out to the public as quickly as possible. Not all of Cassini's images will be released in this way, but unlike the images available on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Cassini raw images website, these so-called "raw preview" images have been processed to remove noise and artifacts caused by imperfections in the camera hardware and electronics.

Lots more HERE

Just staring in awe at this image...

http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/ir_index.php?id=10

("Preview 6")

In lossless compression mode, we tell the camera to expect a certain number of bits per line. In this case the entropy in the images combined with their higher bits per pixel caused us to go over that estimate. When that happens, the camera stops reading out every other line and we get truncated lines. Over-estimating is also bad since the bits per pixel is used to estimate our data volume, which is carefully negotiated between the various instrument teams. If we over estimate, we would have to plan for fewer images.

Two quick mosaics:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/saturn/Enceladus1.jpg

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/saturn/Enceladus2.jpg

EDIT:

Because I couldn't get the brightness difference between images corrected in a good way, I replaced #2 with a non corrected one. Correcting made one part of the image look good and the other not very good so I decided to go for the best detail in the images and just accept the brightness differences.

These two images show what happens if I do correct for the brightness differences:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/saturn/Enceladus2a.jpg
http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/saturn/Enceladus2b.jpg

Thank you DEChengst for Enceladus mosaics. I prefer the uncorrected for brightness version of the mosaic. Have you tried to apply a kind of black to white gradient Y mask to each frames before stitching? Maybe this could help to correct brighness differences? I have try such an analogous method to eliminate "vignetting" in MER pancam images before stitching, with some results...

http://mer.rlproject.com/enc_ir3_g_uv.jpg

http://mer.rlproject.com/enc_narrow_1.jpg

Doug

Did they take any images around closest approach? The closest image I could find so far was about 7000 miles.

yes, but they haven't been played back yet. They were supposed to last night but I'm guessing it will carryover to tonight's downlink

Anyone know the geometry of this encounter? We must be seeing Enceladus against the dark side of Saturn in this image: Casini image

Extremely cool!

I saw that earlier, the caption said Saturn was in the background.

New RAW images posted as Cassini looked back at Enceladus - but no high res images at closest approach Maybe during the next flyby.

I think it is more likely that they just haven't been released. During the Iapetus flyby there were missing images on the "raw" page for the longest time.

Some scientists have suggested that material coming from Enceladus maybe be forming Saturn's E ring. One of the objectives of the flyby was to look for evidence of "ice volcanoes".

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...eiImageID=32339

In the RAW image above, you can see a faint "stream" coming off Enceladus. Is it a simple case of the camera over exposing a specific feature on the moon, producing a flare like feature coming off the surface - or evidence of something else? What do you think?

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/W00004837.jpg

One of the close images of Enceladus is down. And this is WIDE ANGLE!!!!!

Strange. The Ciclops site says it is a narrow angle image taken from 240000 km.
http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=861

It has now disappeared from all raw searches, although the link still works. This convinces me that there are more images from the flyby they are not showing. Not that I blame them. But I am convinced there are more.

I will try to address some of the questions here:

ObsessedWithWorlds: Obviously that distance is not correct. That is a Wide-angle image and the caption writer probably didn't realize that when he wrote it. Except that still doesn't explain it since that image has a pixel scale of 90 m/pixel. For orientation purposes, the squarish feature near the top of that frame, half way between the right edge of the frame and the limb, is the same feature as the squarish "crater" below and to the right of center in http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=846

Sunspot: we initially got excited about that image as well. I have 60 emails from last night to prove it Unfortunately, it looks like that's just a camera effect, similar to one seen last month in the same area in crescent views of Enceladus (at differing lat/lons), Rhea, and Mimas.

tedstryk: we were supposed to have 9 m/pixel imaging near the limb coinciding with that 90 m/pixel wide-angle image. Unfortunately, it looks like we missed Enceladus just bearly. This was not unexpected, the pointing was expected to be not perfect for this encounter since we couldn't do a live update following the Titan flyby. In fact, that 85-175 m/pixel global mosaic was supposed to be full disk but the mosaic was off by half a frame to a third of Enceladus. The 60 m/pixel frame seem at http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=848 was planned to be centered near the N-S spotted terrain seen at http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=855 .

fredk: that is saturn in the background. If you merge UV3-GRN-IR3, you get a green saturn

I'm no Photoshop expert so I wouldn't know how to do that

If that is a cryoflow in this image perhaps the dark spots are skylights

http://saturn1.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/ima...8/N00028183.jpg

Does anyone know the ground track yet for e4?

JPL will wait till the last few days before the flyby to release that.

Maybe Bjorn might post something on it?

Nice composition. Enceladus and the rings:

Check this one out!

Dione and the rings...... and possibly tiny Janus?

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...eiImageID=32866

It looks like the latest gravity assist put Cassini nearly in the ring plane, the rings are almost edge-on now.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/W00005056.jpg

We probably will be seeing more shots with multiple moons like the one of Dione and Titan.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...eiImageID=32817

It is too bad there isn't a shorter exposure twin for that image.

Whoa, these images are phenomenal.

Tethys and the rings... :

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028465.jpg

The file is called titantethys, but it is really Titan with Dione... Just FYI.

Let's not forget the small ones:

Mimas:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028510.jpg

Janus:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028462.jpg
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028515.jpg

Epimetheus:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028617.jpg

Pandora:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028516.jpg

Prometheus:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028463.jpg
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028512.jpg
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...8/N00028618.jpg

My mistake. It is fixed

Images like these really show us what we missed with Galileo due to the antenna problems.