Facing Dione

Canyons slink southward on Dione, while bright-walled craters gleam in the sun. The Cassini spacecraft imaged this same region from a more southerly viewpoint during an approach earlier this year (see The Crater Gradient).

This view is centered on 9 degrees north latitude, 51 degrees west longitude. North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up.

The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 30, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 197,000 kilometers (122,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 25 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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