Saturn's cratered moon Dione displays a large impact basin near its south
pole in this Cassini spacecraft image. The topographic features that
extend radially away from the basin could be secondary craters or
tectonic grooves related to the impact. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695
miles) across.
This view shows principally the leading hemisphere of Dione. The image
was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle
camera on Nov. 2, 2004, at a distance of 2.1 million kilometers (1.3
million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 100 degrees. North is up. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles)
per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast
enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.
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.
