Here I am trying to write up my Top Ten Pictures of 2008, when I get an email from Carolyn Porco. Dreading what I'll see, I open it. Sure enough, incredible new images from Cassini, just when I've finalized my Top Ten list! Arg! I peruse them anyway, and then find this:
Oh, man. That's Enceladus, a tiny water-ice moon orbiting Saturn. The ridges and cracks are ice floes, not too different from what you see on the Earth's north pole. Note that there's no solid land under our terrestrial arctic region, and for the same reason we think that Enceladus is actually a global ocean covered with floating ice. The lack of craters is because there are few old features on the moon. The shifting floes erase anything that isn't young. This image is spectacular (and a much higher-res version is at the Cassini CICLOPS site). It was taken ...
