The distinctive, wispy system of fractures on the trailing hemisphere of
Saturn's moon Dione shows a great deal of contrast in this ultraviolet
view. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.
North on Dione is up and tilted 30 degrees to the left.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 7, 2005, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet
light centered at 338 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of
approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Dione and at
a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The image has been
contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.
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 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.