Dione’s Fractured Face

The Cassini spacecraft catches a glimpse of the bright fractures that adorn the trailing side of icy Dione.

North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 18, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (623,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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