The soft appearance of Dione's wispy terrains belies their true nature.
They are, in fact, complex systems of crisp, braided fractures that cover
the moon's trailing hemisphere.
(See PIA06162) for a closer view of the fractures.)This view shows
the western potion of the wispy terrain on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700
miles across). The craters Dido and Antenor can be seen near the
terminator at lower left.
In the rings above, the dark Cassini Division between the A and B rings is
visible.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera
on Oct. 9, 2005, 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 52 degrees. The 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
