Arabian Sulci

Enceladus shows off its tortured south polar terrain, which is crosscut by the roughly parallel furrows and ridges called sulci, or informally, "tiger stripes."

Several features on Enceladus were recently given names by the International Astronomical Union in accord with the naming convention for the icy moon, which draws from characters and places from The Arabian Nights. The four most prominent sulci are named Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus.

Lit terrain in this view is on the anti-Saturn side of Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 8, 2006 at a distance of approximately 399,000 kilometers (248,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute