Looking Down on Dione

Craters dot Dione's high northern latitudes, and, farther south, wispy fractures stretch across the moon's equator and mid-latitudes.

To learn more about Dione's wisps, see Scratches on Dione.

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). The north pole of Dione lies in darkness just to the right of the middle of the terminator. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 29, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale is 7 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