A Stressed Surface

This southerly view of Dione shows enormous canyons extending from mid-latitudes on the trailing hemisphere, at right, to the moon's south polar region.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) and is centered on 22 degrees south latitude, 359 degrees west longitude. North on Dione is up; the moon's south pole is seen at bottom.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 8, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 211,000 kilometers (131,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 20 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute