Cassini eyes youthful-looking Saturnian moon.On July 14, the Cassini spacecraft spacecraft Vehicle designed to operate, with or without a crew, in a controlled flight pattern above Earth's lower atmosphere. Since streamlining is not needed in the high vacuum of this environment, a spacecraft's shape is designed according to its mission (see came within 175 kilometers of Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus, the nearest that the craft has come to any of the ringed planet's satellites. Images taken at close range reveal a terrain of faults, folds, and ridges nearly devoid of craters. That landscape suggests that old pockmarks have been erased e·rase tr.v. e·rased, e·ras·ing, e·ras·es 1. a. To remove (something written, for example) by rubbing, wiping, or scraping. b. by recent geological activity, perhaps only tens of millions of years ago. The false-color image above shows long fractures (blue), about 100 meters wide. Fractures, including those in the inset, may release icy material that vaporizes, contributing to the thin atmosphere that Cassini previously detected around Enceladus (SN: 4/16/05, p. 253), It's still a mystery why this moon, only 500 km in diameter, exhibits such diverse topographic topographic describing or pertaining to special regions. features, says Cassini scientist Carolyn Porco Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist and the leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission[1],[2],[3] presently in orbit around Saturn. of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. |
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