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 PIA11114).
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.