Down on Dione

The fractured terrain so distinctive to Dione curves away toward the south in this view, which looks down at the moon's northern hemisphere.

Lit terrain in this view is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 22, 2006 at a distance of approximately 943,000 kilometers (586,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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