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

Pair to Compare

Caption: Dione (1,118 kilometers, 695 miles across) occults part of Saturn’s distant rings while Tethys (1,071 kilometers, 665 miles across) hovers below.

This image offers excellent contrast with a previously released view (see PIA06629, which also shows these two moons) 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 narrow angle camera on March 19, 2005, from 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 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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