In 1789, German-born British astronomer William Herschel discovered Saturn’s moon Enceladus, eight years after he amazed the world by finding the planet Uranus. Just 310 miles (500 kilometers) in diameter, or one-seventh the width of our Moon, Enceladus remained a dot through telescopes until the early 1980s, when the twin Voyager spacecraft sped by with cameras clicking.
The Voyager probes revealed that the surface of Enceladus is largely water ice, pockmarked by intriguing features that soon received names dictated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Although Enceladus was a giant in Greek mythology, the IAU decreed its features must be named after characters and places from T
he Arabian Nights, and not just any translation, but Richard Francis Burton’s.
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