These views have been combined into an animated sequence. This movie provides a close-up look at what is surely one of the youngest surfaces in the Saturn system.

From afar, Enceladus exhibits a bizarre mixture of softened craters and complex, fractured terrains. The initial image in the movie is a large mosaic of 21 narrow-angle camera images that have been arranged to provide a full-disk view of the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Enceladus.

This mosaic is a false-colour view that includes images taken at wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the infrared portion of the spectrum. In false-colour, many long fractures on Enceladus exhibit a pronounced difference in colour (represented here in blue) from the surrounding terrain.

The movie zooms in on the southern polar terrains and closes in on one of the tectonic stripes that characterise this region which is essentially free of sizeable impact scars.

The bright oblong area seen during the zoom is an intermediate resolution image from near the time of closest approach that has been melded into the low-resolution mosaic, and artificially brightened.

The movie ends on the highest resolution image acquired by Cassini which reveals a surface dominated by ice blocks between 10 and 100 metres across, lying in a region that is unusual in its lack of the very fine-grained frost that seems to cover the rest of Enceladus. The lack of frost and the absence of craters are indicators of a youthful surface.

Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The south polar region (seen here at the lower right) has a distinctive tectonic structure that sets it apart from the rest of the satellite. Its outer boundary is marked by a series of pronounced tectonic 'gashes' that form a hoop-like boundary, near 60 degrees south latitude. In this image, this fault zone forms the transition region from the presumably older, cratered terrain in the north to the younger, nearly crater-free region in the south.

This false-colour view is a composite of individual frames obtained using filters sensitive to ultraviolet (centred at 338 nanometres), green (centred at 568 nanometres) and infrared light (centred at 752 nanometres). The view has been enhanced to accentuate subtle colour differences and fine-scale surface features.

Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was obtained in visible light with the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on 14 July 2005, at a distance of about 20 720 kilometres from Enceladus. The image scale is 122 metres per pixel. The contrast has been enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.

Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The image was taken during the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft's very close fly-by of Enceladus on 14 July 2005, from a distance of approximately 208 kilometres above Enceladus. Resolution in the image is about 37 metres per pixel. The contrast has been enhanced to improve the visibility of surface features.

Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Some smearing of the image due to spacecraft motion is apparent in this scene, which was acquired as Enceladus raced past Cassini's field of view near the time of closest approach. At the time, the imaging cameras were pointed close to the moon's limb (edge), rather than directly below the spacecraft. This allowed for less motion blur than would have been apparent had the cameras pointed straight down. So the terrain imaged here was actually at a distance of 319 kilometres.

This image was taken during Cassini's close fly-by of 14 July 2005, from a distance of approximately 208 kilometres above Enceladus. Resolution in the image is about 4 metres per pixel. The image has been contrast enhanced to improve the visibility of surface.

Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute