I know it sounds like the title from a children’s book about a young lad named Cassini who has to run through the magical hair-gardens of the kingdom of Enceladus, but it’s way cooler than that.
On November 2, the Cassini spacecraft successfully flew through that really cool¬†plume of what is currently thought to be “water vapor, sodium, and organic materials” from previous flybys. While it was doing so, it was relaying information back to the NASA scientists involved in the project who are now knee deep in new information about this incredibly interesting moon of Saturn. They took some distant pictures capturing some incredible photos of the planet from afar, but also flew about 100 kilometers above the surface, all the while snapping pictures and analyzing the surface of the planet with VIMS, their Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer. There’s great information up giving a higher level view of the findings at ScienceDaily, and a really great description with more detail on NASA’s page written by Bonnie J. Buratti, one of the scientists involved in interpreting the data.