Dione appears small and far off in this Cassini view, which nonetheless
manages to capture a detailed look at the moon's beautiful bright streaks,
or "linea." The linea are a system of braided canyons that cut across the
moon's face.
North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up and rotated
28 degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 29, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Dione and
at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is
11 kilometers (7 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
