As it departed its encounter with Saturn's moon Dione, Cassini sailed
above an unreal landscape blasted by impacts. The rising Sun throws
craters into sharp contrast and reveals steep crater walls.
At the far right, a medium-sized crater is bisected by a fracture,
revealing a cross section of the impact site.
The seven clear-filter images in this mosaic were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2005, at distances ranging from
of 21,650 to 25,580 kilometers (13,450 to 15,890 miles) from Dione and at
a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 154 degrees. Resolution in the
original images ranges from 126 to 154 meters (413 to 505 feet) per pixel.
The images have been re-sized to have an image scale of about 100 meters
(330 feet) per pixel. North on Dione is 140 degrees to the left.
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.