Cassini captured Dione against the globe of Saturn as it approached the
icy moon for its close rendezvous on Dec. 14, 2004. This natural color
view shows the moon has strong variations in brightness across its
surface, but a remarkable lack of color, compared to the warm hues of
Saturn's atmosphere. Several oval-shaped storms are present in the
planet's atmosphere, along with ripples and waves in the cloud bands.
The images used to create this view were obtained with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 603,000
kilometers (375,000 miles) from Dione through a filter sensitive to
wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle is 34 degrees. The image scale is
about 32 kilometers (20 miles) 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 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.
