Dione’s Canyonlands

The Cassini spacecraft views the far-off wispy canyons of Saturn's moon Dione and sees an interesting dichotomy between the bright wisps and the bright south polar region at the bottom.

The view looks toward the trailing hemisphere on Dione. North is up. Dione's diameter is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles).

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera on Sept. 20, 2005, through a filter combination sensitive to polarized green light. The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 64 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 12 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two 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