Saturn's moon Enceladus hovers above Saturn's sharp rings in this colorful Cassini image.
Saturn's moon Enceladus hovers above Saturn's sharp rings in this colorful Cassini image. The rings, which are composed of almost pure water ice, have been contaminated in some way by meteoric dust in their history, which is at least several hundred million years old.
Enceladus shares the composition of water ice with the rings, but has avoided the dust contamination due to some process of surface reconstruction that scientists are still trying to understand. The diameter of Enceladus is 505 km. The dust affects the color of the rings, while the differences in brightness are linked to the different particle sizes and densities.
The natural color images were taken using Cassini's narrow-angle camera on April 5, 2005, from a distance of about 2.2 million km from Saturn using the combination of the three filters - the red, green and blue. The resolution of the image is 13 km per pixel.
