Study in Contrasts

Crisp details on Dione contrast with the haziness of Titan in this Cassini spacecraft image of a pair of Saturn's moons.

Smaller Dione is at the bottom of the image, and that moon's wispy terrain is visible. See Profiling Dione's Wisps to learn more about Dione's surface features. Titan dominates the rest of the image, and that moon's north polar hood is visible here. See Haze Layers on Titan to learn more about Titan's atmospheric haze.

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across) and in the area between the trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across).

The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 20, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Dione and at a sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Titan and at a sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. Image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Dione and 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on Titan.

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