Map of Dione – October 2010

This global map of Saturn's moon Dione was created using images taken during flybys by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Images from NASA's Voyager mission fill the gaps in Cassini's coverage.

An extensive system of bright ice cliffs created by tectonic fractures adorns the moon's trailing hemisphere, which is centered on 270 degrees west.

The map is a simple cylindrical (equidistant) projection and has a scale of 153 meters (500 feet) per pixel at the equator. The resolution of the map is 64 pixels per degree. The mean radius of Dione used for projection of this map is 563 kilometers (350 miles).

This map is an update to the version released in February 2010 (see Map of Dione - February 2010). The title of that older version ("Map of Dione - February 2010") denotes the month the map was released, not when the data in the map were collected. The title of this new version reflects when the most recent data used in the map were captured.

The newest data were used to improve coverage across the whole north polar region. Moving south from the north polar region, coverage is improved all the way down to about 45 degrees south latitude in the area between the leading hemisphere and the anti-Saturn side of the moon from about 95 degrees west longitude to 135 degrees west longitude. Even farther south, new coverage on the trailing hemisphere reaches to about 65 degrees south latitude from about 220 degrees west longitude to 360 degrees west longitude.

Like other recent Dione global maps, this map has been shifted west by 0.6 degrees of longitude, compared to the 2006 version of the map ( Map of Dione - December 2006), in order to conform to the International Astronomical Union longitude system convention for Dione.

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 in Washington. 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 or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute