Bright Ejecta

Ejected material appears bright around some of Dione's craters in the image taken during the Cassini spacecraft's flyby of the moon on March 28, 2012.

This view is centered on terrain at 25 degrees north latitude, 128 degrees west longitude on Dione (698 miles, 1123 kilometers across).

See Bright Rays to see ejecta, or material thrown outward by the impact that formed a crater, covering a large area on the moon Rhea.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 55 degrees. Image scale is 876 feet (267 meters) 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute