Flying Over Dione

The Cassini spacecraft swooped in for a close-up of the cratered, fractured surface of Saturn's moon Dione in this image taken during the spacecraft's Jan. 27, 2010, non-targeted flyby.

Cassini came within about 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) of the moon during this flyby, and this image was acquired at a distance of approximately 46,000 kilometers (29,000 miles). See Wispy Marble for an older, closer view of Dione.

This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on Dione is up. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was acquired at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 108 degrees. Image scale is 270 meters (886 feet) 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