Battered Dione

The Cassini spacecraft looks down over high northern latitudes on Dione.

The view captures terrain stretching from about 30 degrees south latitude to about 65 degrees north latitude on the moon's Saturn-facing side. Cassini obtained this view from a position 48 degrees above the equator of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 3, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 129,000 kilometers (80,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 87 degrees. Image scale is 767 meters (0.5 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