With the icy rings between them, Dione and Tethys each show off the
prominent features for which they are known. Dione, beyond the rings,
displays wispy fractures that adorn its trailing side. Tethys, on the
side of the rings closest to Cassini, shows its large impact basin
Odysseus.
At right, the night side of Saturn can be seen occulting the far side of
the rings. The view shows the Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,126
kilometers, or 700 miles across) and the anti-Saturn side of Tethys
(1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Nov. 8, 2005, at a distance of approximately 3.5
million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Dione and 2.8 million
kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 21
kilometers (13 miles) per pixel on Dione and 17 kilometers (11 miles)
per pixel on Tethys.
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.