Slicing Through Dione

Dione is partly occulted by Saturn's rings in this nearly edge-on view, taken from less than a tenth of a degree above the ringplane. The side of the rings nearer to the Cassini spacecraft was masked by Saturn's shadow at the time and appears dark.

Bright, wispy fractures on Dione's trailing hemisphere curl around the horizon. Sunlit terrain seen on Dione (1,126 kilometers, 700 miles across) is on the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere. North is up.

The image was taken in infrared light (centered at 752 nanometers) with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 3, 2005 at a distance of approximately 2.5 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 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 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