Dione’s Transition Zone

Dione's dark trailing hemisphere (toward the left) and bright leading hemisphere are both visible in this view centered on the moon's anti-Saturn facing side.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 21, 2008 at a distance of approximately 863,000 kilometers (537,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 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