Featured planetary moon
Enceladus
A bright ice world venting an ocean into space.
Enceladus reflects sunlight from a remarkably fresh icy surface. Near its south pole, fractures feed plumes of water-rich material that connect a subsurface ocean to Saturn’s E ring.
- Orbit representation
- Representative mean elements
- Surface
- derived map
Reference measurements
The numbers that shape this world
- Mean radius
- 252.1 km
- Mean orbital distance
- 238,400 kmSemi-major axis around the parent body.
- Orbital period
- 1.37 days
- Eccentricity
- 0.005
- Inclination
- 0°Local Laplace plane from the JPL pole
- Rotation
- Tidally locked
World portrait
An ocean sampled without landing
Material escaping through the south-polar fractures lets spacecraft investigate an interior ocean from orbit. The page separates that scientific story from the representative scene geometry.
System geometry
Enceladus in motion around Saturn
Enceladus travels at a mean orbital distance of 238,400 km and completes a circuit in 1.37 days. Its eccentricity of 0.005 and 0° inclination are read against Local Laplace plane from the JPL pole. Synchronous rotation keeps the same hemisphere broadly oriented toward the parent body.
Representation notes
What Explore is showing
JPL fitted mean elements describe general orbit shape and orientation; they are not an accurate ephemeris.
Reviewed official partial imagery prepared as a 1K display texture. Unobserved areas are softly completed from the observed hemisphere so the globe remains natural-looking in motion; the body summary identifies those regions as reconstructed rather than directly observed. Final seam, pole and landmark review remains device-dependent.
Provenance