Bright, wispy fractures streak across Dione's trailing side. Following the
Voyager flybys of the early 1980s, scientists considered the possibility
that the streaks were bright material extruded by cryovolcanism. A
quarter-century later, Cassini's close passes and sharp vision showed
these features to be a system of braided canyons with bright walls.
North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Sept. 30, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 36 degrees. Image scale is 3
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.
