Dione: Magnified View

This close-up of Dione's icy surface shows deeply shadowed craters near the terminator, as well as a group of roughly linear faults above center.

The terrain shown here is on the moon's leading hemisphere. North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up and tilted 21 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 24, 2005 at a distance of approximately 152,000 kilometers (94,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 904 meters (2,965 feet) 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