The Enceladus Atlas (2008)

Presented here is a complete set of cartographic map sheets from a high-resolution Enceladus atlas, a project of the Cassini Imaging Team.

The map sheets form a 15-quadrangle series covering the entire surface of Enceladus at a nominal scale of 1:500,000. An index for the atlas is included here, along with an unlabeled version of each terrain section. The map data was acquired by the Cassini imaging experiment. The mean radius of Enceladus used for projection of the maps is 252.1 kilometers (156.6 miles). Names for features have been approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

***ERRATA (2008-02-13): Longitude System Discrepancy*** The maps presented here did not account for the most recent recommendations by the International Astronomical Union cartography working group as described in Seidelmann et al., 2007. There is a slight difference (about 0.9 degrees) between the longitudes given in this atlas and the IAU definition. With the new recommendations, crater Salih should have a fixed longitude of 5 degrees West. Crater Salih is hardly visible in the Cassini images therefore the exact consequences of preparation of these maps without the new recommendations is difficult to estimate. Crater Salih will be imaged with better resolution during the upcoming Enceladus flybys in 2008. The imaging team will use these coming images to determine the exact shift between the current atlas and the IAU definition and will release a corrected (shifted) version of this atlas in 2009.

References:

(1) Davies, M. E. and Katayama, F. Y., The control networks of Mimas and Enceladus, Icarus, 53, 332-340, 1983
(2) Seidelmann, P. K. and 14 co-authors, Report of the IAU/IAGWorking Group on cartographic coordinates and rotational elements: 2006, Celestial Mech. Dyn. Astr., 98, 155-180, 2007.

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