A gorgeous Dione poses for Cassini, with shadowed craters and bright,
wispy streaks first observed by the Voyager spacecraft 24 years ago. The
wispy areas will be imaged at higher resolution in mid-December 2004.
Subtle variations in brightness across the surface of this moon are
visible here as well. Dione's diameter is 1,118 kilometers, (695 miles).
The image shows primarily the trailing hemisphere of Dione, which is the
side opposite the moon's direction of motion in its orbit. The image has
been rotated so that north is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Oct. 27, 2004, at a distance of about 1.2 million
kilometers (746,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 28 degrees. The image scale is 3.5 kilometers (2.2 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.
