Are you dreading the coming of winter up here in Earth’s northern hemisphere? It could be worse. You could be out where the Cassini spaceship is, skimming over the surface of Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of Saturn.
Things are never very warm out on Enceladus. It’s so far out from the sun that it doesn’t get much heat from the sunlight, as our world does. Making matters worse, most of the sunlight that reaches Enceladus is reflected right back into space, because Enceladus is the most reflective body in the entire solar system. So, the warmest it ever gets on Enceladus is negative 333 degrees F.
The winter on Enceladus, of course, gets much, much colder than that. The area in the photograph you see below is of a region of Enceladus called the Baghdad Sulcus. Last night, the Cassini spacecraft skimmed over the Baghdad Sulcus in order to gain a more complete understanding of its formations. The timing of this pass was important, because the region will soon descend into a winter of almost complete darkness that will last not just for a few months, but for several Earth years.
There would be an upside to this extreme coldness, however, if you were to be stuck out on Enceladus. There would be some great skiing. The icy troughs you see in this photograph are 820 feet deep.
