The Arabian Connection

In the boundary between light and shadow on Enceladus, run the Anbar Fossae -- a series of narrow, shallow depressions.

Like other features on this geologically active moon, the fossae are named after a location in The Arabian Nights. In this case, they are named after Anbar, Iraq.

Another Iraqi namesake, the Baghdad Sulcus, is one of several warm `tiger stripe' fractures at the moon's south pole from which emanate heat and icy particles (see Baghdad and Cairo Sulci on Enceladus ).

North is up in this image, and Julnar is the largest crater visible in the northern hemisphere. One of the women in The Arabian Nights lends her name to this crater which is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide.

Fewer craters mark the southern hemisphere because they have been erased by later tectonic forces.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 17, 2008.The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 385,000 kilometers (239,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 104 degrees. Image scale is 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) 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