Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                              2020 September 24

                            Enceladus in Infrared
       Image Credit: VIMS Team, SSI, U. Arizona, U. Nantes, ESA, NASA

   Explanation: One of our Solar System's most tantalizing worlds, icy
   Saturnian moon Enceladus appears in these detailed hemisphere views
   from the Cassini spacecraft. In false color, the five panels present 13
   years of infrared image data from Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping
   Spectrometer and Imaging Science Subsystem. Fresh ice is colored red,
   and the most dramatic features look like long gashes in the 500
   kilometer diameter moon's south polar region. They correspond to the
   location of tiger stripes, surface fractures that likely connect to an
   ocean beneath the Enceladus ice shell. The fractures are the source of
   the moon's icy plumes that continuously spew into space. The plumes
   were discovered by by Cassini in 2005. Now, reddish hues in the
   northern half of the leading hemisphere view also indicate a recent
   resurfacing of other regions of the geologically active moon, a world
   that may hold conditions suitable for life.

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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
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                             & Michigan Tech. U.


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