Canyons and mountain peaks snake along the terminator on the
crater-covered, icy moon Dione. With the Sun at a low angle on their local
horizon, the line of mountain ridges above center casts shadows toward the
east.
Sunlit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Dione (1,126
kilometers, or 700 miles across) -- the side that always faces away from
Saturn. North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 15, 2006 at a distance of approximately
299,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 81 degrees. Image scale is 2
kilometers (1 mile) 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.
