Above the Cracks

This Cassini spacecraft view, taken from a vantage point 64 degrees above Dione's equator, looks down onto the bright fractures that cover the moon's trailing side. The fractures crisscross a region of terrain that is significantly darker than the rest of the moon's surface.

Dione is 1,123 kilometers (698 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 15, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 601,000 kilometers (374,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 76 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute