Dramatic Moon

This unmagnified view of Saturn's moon Dione shows the moon's bright, wispy terrain, along with several large impact craters. Two of the craters have central peaks. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.

North on Dione is up. This view shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Dione. It is clear why low-resolution NASA Voyager spacecraft images gave the impression that the Dionian wispy terrain might be bright ice deposits. High-resolution Cassini images have shown these to be complex systems of braided tectonic fractures.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 25, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees. The image scale is 17 kilometers (11 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute