Dione's icy surface is scarred by craters and sliced up by multiple
generations of geologically-young bright fractures. Numerous fine,
roughly-parallel linear grooves run across the terrain in the upper left
corner.
Most of the craters seen here have bright walls and dark deposits of
material on their floors. As on other Saturnian moons, rockslides on
Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) may reveal cleaner ice,
while the darker materials accumulate in areas of lower topography and
lower slope (e.g. crater floors and the bases of scarps).
The terrain seen here is centered at 15.4 degrees north latitude, 330.3
degrees west longitude, in a region called Carthage Linea. North on Dione
is up and rotated 50 degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini narrow-angle
camera on Oct. 11, 2005, at a distance of approximately 19,600 kilometers
(12,200 miles) from Dione. The image scale is about 230 meters (760 feet)
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.