Cassini spied a crater-covered Dione in this image from Dec. 8, 2004. The
bright, wispy streaks for which Dione is known are located on the moon's
night side to the west. The streaky terrain was imaged at very high
resolution by Cassini during its flyby of Dione on Dec. 14, 2004. Dione
is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.
This view shows mostly the trailing hemisphere of Dione. The image was
taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at
a distance of 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Dione and
at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 58 degrees. North is up.
The image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel. The image has been
magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility of
surface features.
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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
