Pair to Compare

Saturn's moon Dione occults part of Saturn's distant rings while Tethys hovers below. Dione is
1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across, while Tethys is 1,071 kilometers, 665 miles) across.

This image offers excellent contrast with a previously released view (see Sister Moons) that showed the bright, wispy markings on Dione's trailing hemisphere. The huge impact structure Odysseus (450 kilometers, or 280 miles across) is near the limb of Tethys. Compared with the battered surface of Tethys, Dione appears much smoother from this distance.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March
19, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn.
The image scale is approximately 15 kilometers (9 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