The Cassini spacecraft takes in the crater-strewn surface near Dione's
south pole in this natural color view. Long fractures slice across the
surface here, as on other parts of the moon. Previous Cassini imaging
investigations have shown that the canyons seen here do not appear to have
the bright, presumably youthful, walls seen in fractures nearer the
equator (see PIA07581).
Dione is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles) across.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken in visible light
with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2007 at a
distance of approximately 268,000 kilometers (166,000 miles) from Dione
and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 92 degrees. Image scale
is 2 kilometers (5,249 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.
