Saturn's rings slice across this scene, obscuring the cracked face of
Dione.
The contrast between the dark terrain on Dione's (1,126 kilometers, or 700
miles across) trailing side and the brighter terrain on its leading side
is particularly obvious here.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from less than a
degree below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2008. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (970,000
miles) from Dione. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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.