Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

Dramatic Moon

Caption: This unmagnified view of Dione (1,131 kilometers, 703 miles across) shows the moon’s bright wispy terrain along with several impact large craters. Two of the craters have central peaks.

North on Dione is up. This view shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Dione. It is clear why low resolution Voyager images gave the impression that the Dionian wispy terrain might be bright ice deposits. High resolution Cassini images have shown these to be complex systems of braided tectonic fractures.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on April 25, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees. The image scale is 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel.

[Caption updated on October 5, 2005.]

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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