Bright Canyons

Dione's defining feature, the fractures on its trailing side, shine brilliantly in this Cassini spacecraft view.

The view was acquired from a position 33 degrees south of the moon's equator. Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing side of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North is up and rotated 8 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 11, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 833,000 kilometers (517,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 67 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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