Looking down toward the north pole of the moon Dione, the Cassini
spacecraft sights wispy features.
These linea cover the trailing hemisphere of the moon. Cassini high
resolution images revealed these bright features to be geologically young
fractures exposing the icy surface of the moon. (See PIA07638).
Lit terrain seen here is mostly on the Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,123
kilometers, or 698 miles across), but the wispy area is on the moon's
trailing hemisphere. The north pole lies on the terminator about a quarter
of the way inward from the top of the image. The image was taken in
visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 2,
2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million
kilometers (870,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 88 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.