Bright fractures creep across the surface of icy Dione. This extensive
canyon system is centered on a region of terrain that is significantly
darker that the rest of the moon. Part of the darker terrain is visible at
right.
Lit terrain in this view is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Dione
(1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across). North is up and rotated eight
degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately
677,000 kilometers (421,000 miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 62 degrees. Image scale is 4
kilometers (2 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 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.
