The Cassini spacecraft spies bright fractures in the icy crust of Dione.
These bright "linea" cover the moon's trailing hemisphere and were imaged
by Cassini at high resolution in 2005 (see PIA07368).
This view looks toward the northern hemisphere on Dione's anti-Saturn
side. North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up and
rotated 33 degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 1, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.8
million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees. Image scale is 11
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.