The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is getting its Cassini spacecraft ready to photograph the frozen spouts noticeable along fissures found at the south pole of Saturn's moon, Enceladus.

Amanda Hendrix, Cassini mission scientist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., seemed very excited about the upcoming event; she said the craft would only be 50 kilometers (30 miles) away from the moon’s surface.

Earlier this year, in April, NASA announced it would extend Cassini’s mission for an additional two years. The unmanned Cassini-Huygens spacecraft had a seven year journey for reaching the planet and has been touring Saturn and its moons since 2004; the project was supposed to be terminated in July 2008. The program’s extension, which will cost no less than $160 million, includes 60 extra orbits of Saturn as well a series of flybys of its moons, out of which 26 of Titan and 7 of Enceladus.

The Cassini-Huygens mission was put together by the joint efforts of NASA and the European and Italian space agencies. However, when talking funds, the balance is a bit unproportionate, as out of the initial cost of $3.3 billion, $2.6 billion came from the US.

Today’s mission is expected to bring information about the size of the ice grains and also help build temperature maps in order to determine whether or not liquid water or water vapor exists on the moon’s surface.

On Sunday, Carolyn Porco, Cassini's imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said that whatever the spacecraft will record would be a first and surely "a very unusual event."