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Craters Crowd the North

Craters Crowd the North
This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows battered terrain around the north pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Craters

This view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows battered terrain around the north pole of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Craters crowd and overlap each other, each one recording an impact in the moon’s distant past.

The moon’s north pole lies approximately at the top of this view from Cassini’s wide-angle camera. A companion view from the narrow-angle camera (PIA19660) shows the pole at a resolution about ten times higher.

North on Enceladus is up. The image was taken in visible light by Cassini on Oct. 14, 2015.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 4,000 miles (6,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 8 degrees. Image scale is 1,093 feet (333 meters) per pixel.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute