The wispy fractured terrain on Dione is illuminated here by "Saturnshine"
-- dim reflected light from the planet.
The region pictured on Dione (1,126 kilometers, 700 miles across) is on
the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere. North is up.
The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 24, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.2
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel. The image has been
magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.
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.
