Scarred Dione

The tortured terrain of Saturn's moon Dione is documented in this Cassini spacecraft image.

The wispy fractures on the moon's trailing hemisphere can be seen on the left of the image, and cratered terrain on the moon's anti-Saturn side dominates the center of the image. See Wisps on Dione to learn more. North on Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across) is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 23, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 896,000 kilometers (557,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 81 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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