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Enceladus: a VERY active moon... (1)
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A false color look reveals subtle details on Enceladus that are not visible in natural color views. The now-familiar bluish appearance (in false color views) of the Southern "Tiger Stripes" features and other relatively youthful fractures is almost certainly attributable to larger grain sizes of relatively pure ice, compared to most surface materials.
On the Tiger Stripes, this coarse-grained ice is seen in the colored deposits flanking the fractures as well as inside the fractures. On older fractures in other areas of Enceladus, the blue ice mostly occurs on the exposed wall scarps.
The color difference across the moon's surface (a subtle gradation from upper left to lower right) could indicate broad-scale compositional differences across the moon's surface. It is also possible that the gradation in color is due to differences in the way the brightness of Enceladus changes toward the limb, a characteristic which is highly dependent on wavelength and viewing geometry.
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