Dunyazad is a large

crater A crater is a landform consisting of a hole or depression (geology), depression on a planetary surface, usually caused either by an object hitting the surface, or by geological activity on the planet. A crater has classically been described ...

Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant, with an average radius of about 9 times that of Earth. It has an eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 tim ...

's moon

Enceladus Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn and the 18th-largest in the Solar System. It is about in diameter, about a tenth of that of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It is covered by clean, freshly deposited snow hundreds of meters thick, ...

first discovered by the ''

Voyager 2 ''Voyager 2'' is a space probe launched by NASA on August 20, 1977, as a part of the Voyager program. It was launched on a trajectory towards the gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and enabled further encounters with the ice giants (Uranus and ...

'' spacecraft. It is named after

Dunyazad This is a list of characters in ''One Thousand and One Nights'' (also known as ''The Arabian Nights''), the classic, medieval collection of Middle-Eastern folk tales. Characters in the frame story Scheherazade Scheherazade or Shahrazad (, ''Š ...

, the sister of

Scheherazade Scheherazade () is a major character and the storyteller in the frame story, frame narrative of the Middle Eastern collection of tales known as the ''One Thousand and One Nights''. Name According to modern scholarship, the name ''Scheherazade ...

in ''

The Book of One Thousand and One Nights ''One Thousand and One Nights'' (, ), is a collection of History of the Middle East, Middle Eastern List of fairy tales, folktales compiled in the Arabic language during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as ''The Arabian Nigh ...

''. Dunyazad is located at and is approximately 31 kilometers across, making it one of the largest craters on Enceladus. It is the southernmost crater of a prominent crater triplet on Enceladus' anti-Saturnian hemisphere (there is no evidence that the impacts are related or were formed from break-up of a single body, like Shoemaker-Levy 9). The craters to its north are Shahrazad, and Al-Haddar. ''Voyager 2''

discovery images Discovery may refer to: * Discovery (observation), observing or finding something unknown * Discovery (fiction), a character's learning something unknown * Discovery (law), a process in courts of law relating to evidence Discovery, The Discover ...

of this crater revealed an up-domed floor at Dunyazad, suggesting that the crater had been modified by viscous relaxation. Higher resolution views of Dunyazad taken by the ''Cassini'' Spacecraft during a close flyby on March 9, 2005 reveal not only an up-domed floor, but numerous tectonic fractures as well, particularly within the dome and northeastern crater rim.

References

Impact craters on Enceladus {{Saturn-crater-stub