The Cassini mission was able to capture an image of Saturn’s ice moon Enceladus, which is believed to conceal a subterranean ocean under its frozen surface. It may seem like rivers have been cut into the surface of the small moon, but scientists believe that the cracks are really hot places in the crust where water ice & gas shoot out from the ocean bottom and feed Saturn’s E ring. At the bottom of some of these fissures, there could be hydrothermal vents that go down to the ocean floor.
Enceladus, which belongs to Saturn, is the moon with the sixth-largest volume. Enceladus is one of the objects in the Solar System that has the most reflecting surface due to the pristine ice that covers its whole planet. Because of this, the surface of the object is much colder than the surface of a material that absorbs light during the middle of the day, reaching just -198 degrees Celsius. Despite its small size, the surface of Enceladus displays a wide variety of geological features. These features range from ancient regions that are heavily cratered to more recent topographies that have been tectonically deformed.
In its orbit around Saturn, the little moon Enceladus traverses a distance equivalent to an average of 148,000 kilometers. As a consequence of this, Enceladus always has the same side as Saturn, which causes its average temperature to be -330 degrees Fahrenheit (-201 Co). In most cases, the thickness of the ice crust falls anywhere between 20 and 25 kilometers.
An enhanced color rendition of the photograph that Cassini captured of the snowy surface of Enceladus. On the surface of the moon may be seen both light blue fractures that run in every direction and deep craters that dot its surface. The shadow of the moon and the dim region to the right of it are partly obscuring the view of the planet.
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