Dim Details on Dione

Cassini whizzed past Dione on Aug. 16, 2006, capturing this slightly motion-blurred view of the moon's fractured and broken landscape in reflected light from Saturn. The motion blur is a result of the long exposure time used to capture dim light from the moon's night side.

The many canyons on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) rip through more ancient craters. Some medium-sized craters, like the one right of center, have several others overprinted onto them.

This view shows southern terrain on the moon's trailing hemisphere. The gleaming, sunlit crescent is overexposed at bottom. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 157,000 kilometers (98,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 129 degrees. Image scale is 935 meters (3,067 feet) 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