Three sizeable impact craters, including one with a marked central peak,
lie along the line that divides day and night on the Saturnian moon,
Dione (dee-OH-nee), which is 1,118 kilometers, or 695 miles across. The
low angle of the Sun along the terminator, as this dividing line is
called, brings details like these craters into sharp relief.
This view shows principally the leading hemisphere of Dione. Some of this
moon's bright, wispy streaks can be seen curling around its eastern limb.
Cassini imaged the wispy terrain at high resolution during its first Dione
flyby on Dec. 14, 2004.
This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Nov. 1, 2004, at a distance of 2.4 million kilometers
(1.5 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 106 degrees. North is up. The image scale is 14 kilometers (8.7
miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and
contrast-enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.
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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
