Far-off Fractures

Wispy streaks curl over the horizon on Saturn's moon Dione, caught here in a distant view from Cassini. The streaks were first revealed by NASA's Voyager spacecraft and subsequently were shown by Cassini to be an immense system of linear fractures in the moon's surface. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The image was acquired on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 118 degrees. The image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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