Saturn's moon Dione is about to swing around the edge of the thin F ring
in this color view. More than one thin strand of the F ring's tight spiral
can be seen here.
The terrain seen on Dione is on the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere. The
diameter of Dione is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles).
Images taken using infrared, green and ultraviolet spectral filters were
composited to create this color view. The images were taken with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 20, 2005, at a distance
of approximately 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Dione and
at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 48 degrees. The image scale
is 12 kilometers (7 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 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.