This close-up of Dione's icy surface shows deeply shadowed craters near
the terminator, as well as a group of roughly linear faults above center.
The terrain shown here is on the moon's leading hemisphere. North on Dione
(1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up and tilted 21 degrees to the
right.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 24, 2005 at a distance of approximately
152,000 kilometers (94,000 miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 904 meters (2,965 feet) 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.