NASA captured northern extremes of Saturn’s icy, ocean-bearing moon

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WASHINGTON: Blurry images captured by NASA’s Voyager mission suggested the Enceladus’ north pole was heavily cratered, but these latest high-resolution shots show instead just how varied the landscape is.Taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it made its 14 October flyby, the images show the northern regions are covered in cracks that slice through the craters on one side, while the other side appears much smoother.NASA captured the best ever views of the northern extremes of Saturn’s icy, ocean-bearing moon as it travelled 1,142 miles (1,839km) above the lunar surface.
The first image shows the curvature of the moon and the pockmarks created by the craters. A second image zooms in closer to this surface to show the cracks that tear through these craters.
One large crack resembles a river running through the centre of this northern region.Cracks have similarly been spotted in the surface of our own moon and this has been blamed on the gravitational pull of Earth tearing its surface apart. In fact, Nasa scientists have identified more than 3,200 cracks, each several miles long and dozens of feet deep, crisscrossing our moon’s surface that resemble those spotted on Enceladus.‘The northern regions are crisscrossed by a spidery network of gossamer-thin cracks that slice through the craters,’ said Paul Helfenstein, a member of the Cassini imaging team at Cornell University, New York.
‘These thin cracks are ubiquitous on Enceladus, and now we see that they extend across the northern terrains as well.’ In another image, Cassini spied a tight trio of craters as it made its approach to the icy moon.The craters, located at high northern latitudes, are sliced through by thin fractures that form part of the network of similar cracks that wrap around the moon.
NASA has dubbed the trio of craters ‘Saturnian snowman’ because of its shape.That particular image was taken in visible light using a narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 6,000 miles (10,000 km) from Enceladus. To give an indication of the size of the 310-mile (500km) wide moon, the image scale is 197ft (60 metres) per pixel.