Dione’s Fractured North

The Cassini spacecraft gazes down at linear tectonic features in Dione's northern hemisphere.

These features -- several canyons and at least one ridge -- are also visible in the upper right quadrant of Dione in Full View. The features themselves are heavily cratered, which suggests they are ancient.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). The view was acquired from 61 degrees north of the moon's equator.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 3, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 684,000 kilometers (425,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 69 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel at maximum resolution.

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