Released August 20, 2004

The THEMIS Image of the Day will be exploring the nomenclature of Mars for the next three weeks.

Hecate Tholus

• Tholus: small dome-shaped mountain or hill
• Hecate: Goddess of the crossroads, ghosts and witchcraft. She has three heads (a dog, a snake, and a horse) that face three different directions. She is served by 2 ghost hounds.

Hecates Tholus is a volcano located north of Elysium Mons. The image above is a mosaic of daytime IR images.

Nomenclature Fact of the Day: Many features on Io, a volcanically active moon of Jupiter, are named for fire, sun, volcano, and thunder goods and goddesses -- or for people and places from Dante's Inferno.

Image information: IR instrument. Latitude 29.1, Longitude 149 East (211 West). 100 meter/pixel resolution.

Note: this THEMIS visual image has not been radiometrically nor geometrically calibrated for this preliminary release. An empirical correction has been performed to remove instrumental effects. A linear shift has been applied in the cross-track and down-track direction to approximate spacecraft and planetary motion. Fully calibrated and geometrically projected images will be released through the Planetary Data System in accordance with Project policies at a later time.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.