Dione's southern polar region (shown here) contains fractures whose
softened appearance suggests that they have different ages than the
bright braided fractures seen in the image to the north. This region is
also notably brighter than the near equatorial terrain at the top of the
image.
At the center, several of the bright, radial streaks mark a feature named
Cassandra, which may be a rayed crater or a tectonic feature.
This view of Dione (1,118 kilometers, or 695 miles across) captures high
southern latitudes on the moon's trailing hemisphere.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately
269,000 kilometers (167,000 miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 41 degrees. Image scale is 2
kilometers (1.2 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.