Bright Fractures in the Dark

The wispy fractured terrain on Dione is illuminated here by "Saturnshine" -- dim reflected light from the planet.

The region pictured on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is on the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere. North is up.

The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 24, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.

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