Hiding Dione

Saturn's rings slice across this scene, obscuring the cracked face of Dione.

The contrast between the dark terrain on Dione's (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) trailing side and the brighter terrain on its leading side is particularly obvious here.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from less than a degree below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (970,000 miles) from Dione. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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