Cassini Does a Little Skeet Shooting

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one interesting place. Ever since Voyager 2 first showed us the puzzling surface of this ice-covered world, planetary scientists have speculated about the processes that shaped it.  The cracks and grooves were interesting enough, but there were also smooth plains and very few impact craters. These are important clues, telling us that Enceladus’s surface gets “repaved” over time. But how? That’s a story planetary scientists are piecing together.

The Cassini-Huygens mission did a very close flyby of Enceladus on August 11 and this is one of the images it returned. The trough crossing the upper part of the image is called Damascus Sulcus. A sulcus is a term planetary scientists use to describe a surface area split with parallel grooves, or ditches, and formed by some kind of geological process (like compression or stretching or pressure from below). This trough appears to be about a couple of kilometers across at its widest (based on a resolution of approximately 30 meters per pixel).

The thing to remember about the surface in this image that it’s made of ice. Wrinkled, stressed ice.  Enceladus is an active world, meaning that there’s something going on beneath the surface. It puts pressure on the ice, causing it to wrinkle and compress.  In addition, Enceladus is venting heat and plumes of water-rich material, similar to the way a geyser works here on Earth.  This moon is geologically active!

You can follow the latest Enceladus images over at the Cassini mission pages. They’ve got a few up already, and there should be more in the days to come.