Dione’s Good Side

Dione appears small and far off in this Cassini view, which nonetheless manages to capture a detailed look at the moon's beautiful bright streaks, or "linea." The linea are a system of braided canyons that cut across the moon's face.

North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up and rotated 28 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 29, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) 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