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Caption:

Saturn's moon Dione occults part of Saturn's distant rings while Tethys hovers below. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across, while Tethys is 1,071 kilometers, 665 miles) across.

This image offers excellent contrast with a previously released view (see PIA06629 ) that showed the bright, wispy markings on Dione's trailing hemisphere. The huge impact structure Odysseus (450 kilometers, or 280 miles across) is near the limb of Tethys. Compared with the battered surface of Tethys, Dione appears much smoother from this distance.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 19, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is approximately 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel.

Background Info:

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

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