As it zoomed in on Saturn's moon Dione for a close flyby, the Cassini
spacecraft captured a set of images of the icy moon which have been
combined into a mosaic here to provide a stunningly detailed global view.
Five narrow angle frames comprise this view of the 'wispy terrain' on the
anti-Saturn side of Dione. To the surprise of Cassini imaging scientists,
the wispy terrain does not consist of thick ice deposits, but rather the
bright ice cliffs created by tectonic fractures. The surface is also
clearly very heavily cratered. The image scale is 0.9 kilometers (0.6
miles) per pixel; the phase angle is 34 degrees.
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.
