Dione’s Southern Basin

A large impact basin dominates the high southern latitudes of Saturn's moon Dione.

See Rebounded Craters to learn more from a similar image. Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on Dione is up and rotated 14 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 25, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 680,000 kilometers (420,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 68 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2.5 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