New Raw Enceladus Images

The ISS camera snapped this image of Enceladus over the weekend, now released on the JPL raw images page. Much of this area seen here was seen on prior encounters at much higher resolution so nothing to get too excited about. However, the "tiger stripes" near the south pole are new as far as I am aware of. The northern tips of these features may have been seen on Rev04 where they were characterized as arcuate ridges or scarps surrounded by blue to blue-green material. Here they are characterized as dark, roughly parallel bands with brighter lanes in the middle (at least in the left band). In this image, they appear similar some of the ridges on Europa where the ridge appears bright and is surrounded by dark material on both flanks. Luckily, we get a much better view on July 14 of these features.

The slight albedo patterns seen north of these tiger stripes are associated with deep fractures and shear features seen in earlier Cassini images as well as low resolution Voyager observations. In these cases, the dark material observed in clear filter images was found to be bluish to blue green in UV-Green-Near-IR false color images.