Dione’s Impact-Battered Icescape

NASA's Cassini spacecraft gazes out upon a rolling, cratered landscape in this oblique view of Saturn's moon Dione. A record of impacts large and small is preserved in the moon's ancient, icy surface.

The image was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera during a close flyby of the icy moon on Aug. 17, 2015. The view was acquired at an altitude of approximately 470 miles (750 kilometers) above Dione and has an image scale of about 150 feet (45 meters) per pixel. North on Dione is down.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute