On November 21, the Cassini spacecraft did another flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and again passing directly through the water vapour plumes emanating from the south pole, obtaining the closest photographs yet of these alien geysers. Even just the raw, unprocessed images which have been published so far are amazing, as in the picture above. For the first time, individual sources of multiple plumes can be seen on the surface itself, even following the path of one of the “tiger stripe” fissures (going into the terminator shadow near the lower centre of the image above).

Additional raw images, including high-resolution closeups of the fissures and ridges, can be seen on the CICLOPS web site.

On a side note, the current exoplanet count is now 405!

Posted by Paul Scott Anderson on November 23, 2009 at 9:04 pm