Craters dot Dione's high northern latitudes, and, farther south, wispy
fractures stretch across the moon's equator and mid-latitudes.
To learn more about Dione's wisps, see PIA09764.
Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1123
kilometers, or 698 miles across). The north pole of Dione lies in
darkness just to the right of the middle of the terminator. The image was
taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 29, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1
million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale is 7
kilometers (4 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.