The Cassini spacecraft investigates the craters and deep valleys on Dione
during a close approach in April 2007.
Significant variations in the density of impact craters on the surface of
Dione can be seen here, with more craters seen on the right side of this
mosaic (on Dione's sub-Saturn hemisphere) than on the left (on Dione's
anti-Saturn hemisphere). The southern end of the bright Palatine Linea
fracture system can be seen near the bottom of the mosaic. Along the
terminator, at lower left, part of a large impact basin can be seen.
The mosaic is an orthographic projection centered at 33 degrees South, 74
degrees West, over the southern part of Dione's leading hemisphere. An
orthographic view is most like the view seen by a distant observer looking
through a telescope. North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles
across) is up and rotated 6 degrees to the right.
The monochrome view uses a combination of images taken with spectral
filters sensitive to wavelengths of light centered at 338, 568 and 930
nanometers.
The images in this mosaic were taken with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 24, 2007 at a distance of approximately
121,000 kilometers (75,000 miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 55 degrees. Image scale is 723
meters (2,371 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
