The icy, cratered surface of Saturn's moon Dione shows more than just its
sunlit side in these two processed versions of the same image.
The view at left, with only mild enhancement, shows a romantic crescent
with large craters visible. The contrast in the version at the right has
been greatly enhanced to show the side of Dione lit faintly by reflected
light from Saturn. A similar phenomenon can be seen from Earth, when the
Moon's dark side is visible due to "earthshine." The crater at the top of
the image appears to have a sunlit central peak in the enhanced view -- a
common characteristic of craters on Dione as seen in Voyager images.
Slight variations in brightness on the moon's dark side hint at the bright
curved linear streaks, seen by Voyager. These streaks are thought to be
deposits of water ice.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
July 2, 2004, from a distance of about 1.4 million kilometers (860,000
thousand miles) from Dione, at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase angle of
about 119 degrees. The image scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel.
Dione's diameter is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across. The images have
been magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.
