Saturn's moon Dione occults part of Saturn's distant rings while Tethys
hovers below. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across, while Tethys
is 1,071 kilometers, 665 miles) across.
This image offers excellent contrast with a previously released view (see
PIA06629) that showed the bright, wispy markings on Dione's trailing
hemisphere. The huge impact structure Odysseus (450 kilometers, or 280
miles across) is near the limb of Tethys. Compared with the battered
surface of Tethys, Dione appears much smoother from this distance.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 19, 2005, at a distance of approximately
2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale
is approximately 15 kilometers (9 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 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.
